The first time I heard the phrase in person, I guess, was as a substitute teacher. “You don’t know me!” said a 5th grade Black boy (at a predominantly white school), in a fight. He repeated the phrase as we pulled him off the other kid. He was right. We didn’t know him. His teacher may have said something like, “I thought I knew him.” She probably knew him better than any of his other teachers. She was a champion for her students. A victim of abuse herself, she was the kind of teacher who stayed after school and taught 5th graders to read if their educations were insufficient or interrupted.

Teachers sometimes say this kind of thing in front of other students. “I thought I knew you!” A narrow conception of the child (and often children in general) is a substitute for genuine connection, for mystery and ambiguity in a student-teacher relationship. So when a kid does something like attack another child, teachers and schools often make them into strangers. What support and connection they were offering is withdrawn. The kid is ostracized. The kid is suspended.

“That we can come to be so completely encapsulated in the world of another’s imagination is remarkable to me. If those visions are enforced, they can almost take away our capacity to want something different.” Prentis Hemphill, What It Takes to Heal.

In this quote I see what people often do to people. Teachers and students as well can box each other in, make a whole lot of assumptions, contain, police actions, police dreams. They don’t always do it with intention. What we call the self is co-created., We’re born into families, communities, and cultures. We are animals with instincts. We have bodies that carry history in them. As Prentis says, it is then a risk “to stretch beyond the containers that have been created for us.”

So how can teachers and schools be more humane? How can they avoid making strangers, or worse, monsters, out of their students? How can they allow or even encourage container questioning, freedom dreaming?

I worry about these things. How is school building a container for my daughter? How does that container support her and how does it constrain her? Teachers often talk about scaffolding learning. They find ways to support students such as sentence starters to help answer questions, word walls to help build vocabulary, and of course there’s the whole system of rules, stated and implicit. But if the support is always directed towards a predetermined answer then it doesn’t seem very empowering. If the implicit rules make my daughter conform to a teacher’s narrow conception of “girl,” I’ll be devastated. But I know they make kids conform. I know they have training in mindset. They echo these slogans such as “the power of yet” and “you can do hard things.” When these slogans are trotted out with no acknowledgement of the individual differences that exist, when they are repeated without talking about the context a child is in, they can tip as easily toward shame as empowerment. Because really, teachers struggle to know their students deeply in our current test-score-focused school climates. And it is with the institutional purpose of raising test scores that these young community members, our children, are often first alienated, made strangers.