Everyone's Got a Story: "What If the ‘Bad Ones’ Are Just Like Us?"

Once you get past all the talk about teaching styles and burnout, there’s one thing a lot of teachers don’t want to admit: they’re struggling to let go of control. For many of them, keeping order in the classroom used to make them feel like they were doing a good job—like they mattered. And now that the old way of doing things isn’t working, they feel frustrated and lost, reaching for anything that promises to restore a sense of stability—even if it looks and feels like surveillance. So, can we go there for a second? Can I push past what’s popular and polite and into what’s honest?

We all should try to understand this from teachers' perspective. AND we also need to understand this is part of a larger cultural sickness—our obsession with neat moral lines, with the illusion of clarity in environments that were never simple.

If we aren't talking about THIS, the shared sickness, then we are not being honest with ourselves. I was reminded of this during a conversation with an older Black man yesterday evening—an elder, really—who had grown up in a low-income urban community shaped by good stuff but also a lot of violence and grief. He spoke with the kind of cool-headed emotional clarity that only time and honesty can produce. He told me about coaching young boys in his neighborhood, many of whom later went to prison. He shared how his own relationship with self-medicating—smoking weed to numb the pain of poverty and loss—had interfered with his consistency as a father and a mentor.

And yet, he also shared with pride the few he had managed to reach, including his middle child, who finished college in part because he sent this child away to live with one of his older children.

He didn’t wear his history like a badge or a burden. He simply held it—his dead children, his imprisoned friends, his brothers and friends who were gone forever. He described people others would cancel: a man who lost his job for stealing, another accused of an inappropriate relationship with a student, men convicted of violent crimes. But he didn’t offer excuses or defenses. He didn’t speak about them with guilt or glorification. He spoke about them as people—complicated people inextricably tied to him by history, geography, and, oh yeah, love.

While he spoke, something clicked: what are we really asking when we expect someone to cut off parts of themselves just to appear "pure"? For this real and complicated man standing in front of me, whom I have long admired, what would it mean to demand that he sever ties with people who shaped his world, simply because their lives didn’t fit our standards of acceptability? I'm not rejecting standards--I am asking us to think about what it means to insist on it for everyone.

What if, instead of listening to his wisdom, I responded with righteous superiority, insisting that failure to condemn was the same as condoning?

It would have meant losing everything he had to teach me—not just about pain, but about love and survival in systems that don’t offer clean exits or simple redemptions.

That moment will stay with me, especially when I reflect on how the messaging of the American left—my own side—has perhaps gone astray. In our desperate pursuit of justice (a worthy pursuit, for sure), we sometimes forget that justice without compassion turns into performance. That many people, especially those shaped by racialized poverty, live entangled lives, where wrongdoing and love are not opposites but often neighbors. And when we ask them to draw hard moral lines—to renounce the messy people they come from or the complicated truths they carry—we are sometimes asking them to amputate themselves. That is not progress. It is self-defeating self-righteousness, cruelty in activist clothing.

This all ties back to the kind of control teachers are looking for in schools today—especially when it comes to safety and discipline. We’ve created this either-or mindset: you’re either for tough rules or you’re too soft; you either believe in strict discipline or you don’t care about safety. But that kind of thinking oversimplifies everything. It helps people feel certain, but it doesn’t help us get to the real truth. And the truth is, a lot of what we call “safety” in schools is more about keeping adults comfortable than it is about treating layered, messy, beautiful, complicated, kids with dignity.

And there's more.

It’s not just the authority of the teacher that is being mourned in today’s classrooms—it’s the authority of the institution itself, the unspoken social contract that once expected students to submit and disappear into docility. When students—especially Black students—refuse to disappear, the system begins looking for ways to disappear them. Metal detectors. Suspensions. Police presence. “No excuses” policies. All in the name of keeping order, but often only masking the deeper disorder: the institution's inability to reckon with the ways it has failed to earn students’ trust.

And so schools find themselves walking a new high wire—this time between structure and surveillance, between accountability and authoritarianism. The challenge isn’t whether to have rules, but how to create environments where those rules don’t mimic carceral logic. This is not a semantic distinction—it is a soul-level one. Because if a classroom cannot function unless students feel fear, then what we’ve built is not a school. It is a theater of control. The question becomes: can we design safety that feels like sanctuary, not lockdown? Can we create a climate that is orderly without being oppressive, structured without being stifling?

Some educators—and especially school leaders—don’t believe that kind of balance is possible. But maybe that’s because we’ve trained ourselves to look for solutions that are clean, when the work is anything but.

The elder I spoke with reminded me of this: that integrity doesn’t always look like moral clarity and that people can be both deeply flawed and deeply loving at the same time. We lose something critical when we pretend that justice requires perfect people to carry it forward. And we lose something just as essential when we build schools that try to protect children by punishing away the mess.

The question is not whether we should have rules or accountability, but whether our systems can hold space for complicated people—the children who act out because they’re grieving, the adults who are still becoming, the parents who are barely holding on, and the staff members who believe safety doesn’t have to mean surveillance.

Structure doesn’t have to mean submission. And order, when built on real relationships, can feel less like control and more like coming home.

Before you scroll on, think about someone like the elder I spoke with—someone who’s lived through more than most of us could imagine, who carries both wisdom and regret, pride and pain. What would it look like to listen instead of judge? To learn from their messiness instead of trying to clean it up?

Drop a comment below:👉 What stories or people in your life have taught you that growth isn’t always neat?👉 Have you ever had to unlearn a version of control that felt good but wasn’t right?

Let’s have a NEW conversation—about grace, personal growth, and the schools (and communities) we’re trying to build.