On the one hand, the importance, even the supremacy, of the "affective domain" is preached to those who would become teachers. The professors, isolated in their ivory towers, far from the daily reality of an actual school filled with actual children, stress that it is important that the pupils "feel good" about being in school.
But on the other hand, the ideal archetype of a teacher is presented as someone who either never has strong emotions, or who keeps them perfectly concealed.
Inconsistently, emotions are presented as being simultaneously the centerpiece of the school and something undesirable in a school.
Current notions of "classroom management" routinely instruct the teacher never to be angry and never to project anger. The teacher is to remain calm and simply implement consequences, disagreeable or pleasant, for behavior good or bad.
To be sure, there is something appropriate in this guidance. One does not want a perpetually angry teacher with a "hair trigger" - one who's ready to begin yelling at students for minor infractions.
Professionalism dictates that a teacher deal calmly with students, explain what they've done wrong, and show them that the consequences that they receive for these actions are both natural and logical.
If we are preparing these students for higher education, for citizenship, or for the work world, we should, however, help them to understand that there are limits to this dynamic. Which employee will long survive the habit of deliberately angering his boss?
There is, at the margins, a place for a teacher to express a healthy anger. Indeed, the failure to appropriately manifest emotion is a mark of the type of dysfunction which the modern or postmodern pedagogue claims to want to avoid in the school.
The measured and professional expression of anger is a mature response to egregious behavior. Yet it is precisely this response which teachers are instructed never to make.
An adult employee in a reasonable workplace knows that it is unwise to deliberately insult or anger his colleagues or his boss. A rational employee has some unease around his employer's anger.
A student who delights in consistently provoking his fellow pupils lacks a healthy respect for the anger of others. This lack will handicap the student in current and future endeavors.
The failure to set an emotionally healthy tone, including a measured and appropriate expression of anger, limits what can be achieved in schools. By prohibiting teachers from a mature and professional expression of anger, we keep students artificially infantile in their emotional development, and allow for a student to inflict negative behavior on other students.
The results in both academic and social progress are visible.
