In Favor

It’s the great paradox of teaching: The students are both the profession’s greatest joy and its largest source of frustration. Mixed feelings may be teaching’s professional hazard, but 85 percent of teachers say they chose this job to make a difference in the life of a child. This is why so many have strategies they use to help them get past their instinctive feelings and maintain fairness and consistency in the classroom.

Of Fairness and Favoritism

Perhaps as a generational response to the harsher education styles with which they were raised, today’s parents want their children to have warm, positive school experiences. Years ago, that wasn’t a priority.

“My teachers didn’t love us. They loved our neshamos,” says Chava, a veteran teacher in the Bais Yaakov system, who was a student decades ago. But with the pain of her teachers’ attitudes still fresh in her mind, Chava strives to ensure that she shows all of her students that she loves them — and that she doesn’t show any one student any more love.

While she likes many of her students — and often keeps in touch with her students well beyond their high school years — she keeps their relationship restrained while they’re still students in her classroom. “I don’t want the class to say, ‘Oh, you love her.’ ”