"A wise educator once told me that students do what we tell them to do."

It was about two weeks into my first year as an English teacher at City on a Hill that I decided to go buy a snack at the local convenience store down the street. On my way I saw three young men in City on a Hill uniforms whom I had never met before walking towards me – seniors, apparently, because they had off-campus lunch privileges – and as we passed I said, “Good afternoon, gentlemen.”

And they replied, “Good afternoon, sir.”

“Good afternoon, sir.”

“Good afternoon, sir.”

I was so stunned I called my dad on my cell phone and told him about what had just happened.

Now, that might not be a particularly moving story to a lot of teachers out there who are used to a modicum of civility from their students, but I taught for the first three years of my career in New York City. I was used to breaking up fights a couple times a day; I would shrug off threats from my students, because the administration would only yell at them and send them back to class; I was told that the solution to a 75% tardiness rate in the morning was to make my class more interesting so that students wouldn’t want to miss it (I can’t really imagine a lesson so captivating that it would internally motivate a student to get up at 6:00am and rush to school).

A wise educator once told me that students do what we tell them to do. And I thought at the time that he was being sarcastic. But looking back on it, the reason the kids in New York fought was because a five-day suspension for staple-gunning another kid in the skull tells him that that is generally frowned upon behavior, but certainly not serious. Having no consequence for tardiness tells kids quite clearly that they should come to school at some point during first period, but it’s okay to take your time.

At City on a Hill, the adults actually tell the young people precisely what they would like them to do. You must wear a belt. If you forget your belt, you have to go home and get your belt. You cannot come late. If you come late, you don’t get to interrupt your first period class, and you have to stay for an hour at the end of the day to make up your work. Learn to write an essay. If you don’t learn how to write a freshman essay, you don’t get to become a sophomore. Here, just like everywhere else, the students do what we tell them to do.

It was a pretty hard for me to fully realize that it was we – the adults – who had failed in that New York school. They were the exact same population of students there that we have here, the exact same socio-economic demographic, but the teachers were largely ill prepared to structure the school. What we do at City on a Hill results in students actually wanting to be excellent students. Because we tell them every day, with every class period, that they should want that.


Dan O'Connor is an English teacher entering his 4th year at City on a Hill. He studied English at the College of Wooster and earned a Masters in Teaching English from Teachers College at Columbia University.