This is a message for teachers wondering how to manage their angry students. How are you doing? Are you struggling with an unusual number of behavioral issues on top of technology and COVID issues? Maybe you have gotten parent emails with that classic “he’s not like this at home!” Or worse, parents are asking you how YOU created the problem of their child’s regular, angry outbursts. Or perhaps parents are not responding at all. Maybe you are writing referrals that seem to be vanishing into cyberspace or wastepaper baskets. COVID has too many administrators running around like the proverbial headless chickens, and headless chickens hardly ever manage small details well. Or big details. Or much of anything else.

Too many people are operating on overload at the moment.

Eduhonesty: Here’s an observation that may help you a little as you try to calm the angry voices in your classroom. You are a safe place. Why does “Martin” blow up in your class? At least sometimes, it’s because Martin thinks that he will be able to vent without the sky falling down on top of him if he does. You are a safe place.

Those venting students may be taken as a sign of poor classroom management — and if they interfere much with daily learning then work on management is possibly indicated — but a truth too often ignored is that Martin feels secure enough to express his stress in your classroom. Martin may desperately need to be heard. He is trusting you enough to give you the chance to be the one who hears him.

The stress on many kids right now breaches extraordinary. That stress permeates even the smallest details of life. Holidays are coming up and maybe Martin is not going to see grandma this winter for the first time ever in his life. He may be terrified grandma will get sick — or worse. All across America, those 246,526 souls who passed away (as of this morning), leave behind their own Martins, their brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, children and grandchildren, lost and mourning as they maybe sit in isolated houses.

We don’t know exactly what kind of a year any of our Martins are having. But this post is a shout-out to the many teachers who are helping and listening as kids unburden themselves. It’s a shout-out to the men and women who are trying to manage rages that are perfectly natural in children who feel helpless, unheard and out-of-control. Teachers are approaching these children with love and support despite the effect of emotional melt-downs on already edgy classes. Sometimes the only calm and safe place our children have is their classroom, and this has never been more true than in 2020.

In dark moments, the greatest gift we offer may be the gift of acknowledgement, the act of making a child feel able to cry out and be heard.