I think my ecosystem is fairly healthy at this point in the term. The only toxic problems are a couple of partnerships that have more or less needed marriage counseling.

In the past, I have seen toxic classrooms that stem from a total lack of respect between students and their teacher. My first year teaching high school, an old Naval warrior came in with big hopes and aspirations, along with a side order of control issues. He thought he could get his students to behave as though they were in the Navy. He yelled a lot. He ordered his students around. He made them line up before entering the classroom. He utterly failed as a teacher.

This teacher, let’s call him Ned Lomax for the sake of this post, made only demands and never requests. He set himself up as an expert disciplinarian, a classroom dictator. Students sensed that any lack of order bothered him. It started, like many disciplinary struggles in classrooms across America, with a few students making Chewbacca sounds while this teacher tried to lecture. Not knowing which students were guilty, Ned punished his entire class over and over again. The students who had not been trying to disrupt the class ended up siding with those who had been driving Ned crazy. Eventually, Ned had a whole class full of Chewbaccas.

Things only got worse from there. Students wore combat helmets to class. They threw stink bombs. They lit firecrackers. Although a decorated Naval office, Ned was not skilled in counterinsurgency tactics. The insurgents were winning.

It all came to ahead when a student hit Ned in the back of the head with a roll of quarters while he was writing something on the board. The Dean, using interrogation tactics he had learned by watching Law & Order, could not break any student. Nobody came forward as a whistleblower. Ned had done the impossible – created solidarity between 25 seventeen-year-olds.

 

Ned never returned after Christmas break.

 

That was a toxic classroom. Maybe my standards for the term are too high, but I doubt we could witness that in a college classroom.