Confession: I do not like one of my students.

So I am one of those teachers who believes in having hope for every one of my students; I believe it is my duty as an educator to look past the layers of anger and insecurity, past the defiance and the distractibility, past the apathy and sociopathology, to look past all the noise and irritation and see the bright glimmering spirit of each of my students, brimming with life and humanity and creativity.  This belief--this attitude towards my students--is a pretty powerful force; it enables me to not take personally when my students have bad days and say or do things that are hurtful or stupid; it enables me to be profoundly positive and not fall into--or allow them to fall into--the traps of negativity; it enables me, above all, to go home believing that the work I do is meaningful and that each of my children has a chance to learn something from my sweat and energy.

But this belief also comes at a cost.  There is no polite way to say this.  I do not like one of my students.  I do not dislike this young man  because he never follows instructions or because he could care less about the writing prompts I give him or because he would rather talk to his friends; he does all of those things, but so do many of his peers and I still like all of them.  I do not like this child because he is mean; he is mean to many of his classmates (I have seen him quietly torture a smaller, weaker boy by throwing small wads of paper at him and he regularly says hurtful things to two girls who sit near him); he is also mean to my colleagues and to me, but, honestly, I can almost understand why a young man would feel compelled to be mean to an adult in this place.  The adults are so regularly mean to the students that meanness in response is, on some level, a sane response.  It's the preying on the weaker children that makes me dislike him so.

He is a bully.  And there is some part of me, deep down, that believes bullies should be punished for their sins, that they are somehow less deserving of my love and care and attention; but because he is such a pain in the ass, he ends up getting more of my attention than other kids in the classroom, and I resent him very deeply for that.

I also know that he has a very unhappy home life.  He doesn't get the love and attention he needs or wants and (maybe) deserves, and there is a (gradually diminishing) part of me that wants to look past all the bad behavior I see and try to understand this child in pain.  But that is very hard to do because mostly what I see is a child causing pain to other children and, at the same time, making it hard for other children in my care to learn.

All of this leaves me feeling, at the end of the day, a little dirty, like I have somehow become one of the teacher drones I see around me, griping ceaselessly about the "little monsters" and making lists of kids who aren't deserving of the privilege of going on a school trip--who aren't deserving of our love.  If I believe that they all deserve our care and attention and love, what do I do with all this resentment and anger I feel towards this young man?

I suppose the first step is to merely accept the reality of my feeling: I do not like this young man.

But I will continue to teach him as best I can, to care for him as best I can, to treat him with fairness and dignity as best as I can, and when I see him tormenting his peers, I will respond as quickly and as even-handedly as I can, because those students--all my students--deserve no less from me than I will give to him, the one I do not like and cannot name.