I haven’t encountered much that I would term toxic to my class ecosystem. Let alone truly toxic. Theoretically, I would say that any violence in the classroom is toxic, destructive, unacceptable. If we’re making hierarchies, I would begin with physical violence. Any instance of fighting, assault, abuse, would seem immediately poisonous to my ecosystem, not to mention personally frightening and awful. Next would be verbal violence in the form of hateful speech, antagonism, harassment, or any intimidation. I haven’t heard any of these either. I did ask one day for my students to share an anecdote and they asked me whether they needed to censor themselves. I said that as long as they weren’t going to say anything hurtful, racist, sexist, than no. As it turns out, they just wanted to talk about getting drunk. Which was fine, if not as interesting to me as it was to them. There are certain words, of course, that I don’t want to hear in the classroom. Certain aggressive modes of interaction that I can’t condone. I don’t know how I would deal with it, to be honest, if it came up. My class is pretty careful and sweet. They seem pretty aware of how their words and behaviors impact each other.

I guess there is a low level of toxic behavior that might go under the heading “academic.” Cheating, lying, false-representation. Taking credit for other people’s words or work. For instance, submitting old work or fake work for extension projects. I don’t know if that would be toxic to the class ecosystem, but it would make me upset. I did have one student turn in a piece of writing for Project 1 that I was pretty sure was a recycled book report. I gave him an incomplete and warned him about it in my meeting. He visibly gulped when I called him out on it. I wouldn’t call it toxic though. I didn’t feel poisoned or taken-advantage of. We talked about it, and I gathered that he just felt really uncomfortable with auto-biographical writing and recycled something he had already written. I think the incomplete and the warning I gave him was a sufficient response. So that sort of academic dishonesty is pretty low down on my list of bad behavior.

I think the more common kind of bad behavior, the kind of behavior that actually damages the ecosystem, is pretty subtle. It’s the refusal to participate. It’s the guy playing games on his phone while his peers present their poster. It’s the guy who halts our conversation to say that whether or not Disney Princesses are good role models doesn’t matter to him. It’s the students who show up without work on workshop days. It’s all the little ways that students don’t participate or undermine the class as a whole, or do any kind of little thing that makes other students less likely to buy in, to speak up, to feel safe and supported and invested. These behaviors are small and hard to catch sometimes. But over time, I think they can have a corrosive affect. So I try to catch them. I try to make sure that I make my requests for their attention and their participation clear. That I frame my words and my responses around being respectful and supportive of each other.

The reality is that I just haven’t been doing this long enough to know what takes behavior from irritating to corrosive to toxic. It would seem that me talking about plagiarism might in fact be toxic. I have to admit, I didn’t see that coming, but I was persuaded. I feel like I can edit that one out of my vocabulary pretty easily too; I always like to move towards greater specificity. The point being that toxic behavior or toxic concepts (words, phrases, ideas) are not always readily apparent. It’s important that we keep paying attention, that we don’t assume we’ve figured it all out. Because even our attempts at regulating toxic behavior can become toxic.