Tough Love with Soft Gloves

In this paper we want to probe the meaning of “Tough Love” in the classroom. We start with an attempt to define it and how it affects the instructor who uses this approach in the classroom. We ask what happens to our teaching evaluations and does this affect our own desire to pursue this approach or to give up using it? Then we examine the dynamic of using this approach in the classroom and talk about the students’ point of view as they respond to the instructor’s position.

The term has its beginnings in parenting, and, as one internet site presents it, “Tough Love” may be defined as “The compassionate use of stringent disciplinary measures, to attempt to improve someone’s behavior.” Of course, that is a very severe view of Tough Love, and we have to ask what it means if applied in the classroom. We take the word “compassionate” to begin with, that this approach shows great caring and respect for the students. From the word “disciplinary” we remove the punitive overtones and say that we simply demand high standards, and for “behavior” we refer to the way a student comes to a course and participates in it.

The job of teaching is hard work anyway, but becomes even more arduous for instructors the more they enforce their own demanding policies. And not all students really respond to this approach. This is where the course evaluations may be discouraging, when students say the class is “too hard,” “takes up too much of my time,” or “is not relevant in all the details.” How do you feel when all your dedicated and time-consuming work is so little appreciated? Should you just relax, be less hard on yourself, and teach to the lowest common denominator in the class? To answer these questions, let’s take a look at what actually happens in the classroom.

Walking into the classroom on the first day of class is an electrifying experience, for the instructor and the student. When the instructor stands up in front of the students for the first time in a class, this is the beginning of an electromagnetic reaction in which the instructor is the catalyst, charging the spark of knowledge, and the students are the conductors, receiving and transmitting the light of knowledge, we hope, at least for the duration of the class. Teaching and learning are never one-way roads. So what happens when, at the end of the class, the teaching evaluations tell us that our hard work has not been as igniting as we had thought for all our students. It is always a cold shower for us to learn that some students considered our expectations unreasonably high or not backed up with the support they would have liked to receive from us in order to meet them. What do the students try to tell us in their less than complementary evaluation of our teaching?

We would like to propose that, cases like this indicate that the teaching style of the instructor and the learning style of the student were not a happy match. Just as there are no two teaching styles alike, our students, subconsciously rather than consciously, craft their own learning styles. If our teaching philosophy is to show the students how high they can jump when we say “jump,” then, we would like to suggest, it is also our responsibility to help the students learn how to jump as high as we think they should be able to. “Tough Love” can backfire at us in evaluation forms, if we do not practice it with “Soft Gloves.” In this, we think, lies the highest challenge for educators. There is no effective “Tough Love” without “Soft Gloves.”