Maybe being in someone else's shoes should be required training

I never understood some of the ways my teachers behaved until I started teaching myself. Why did certain emails get ignored? Why did they grade so carelessly? What made them so angry about questions related to the exams?

Teaching over the last seven years has exposed me to a lot of situations that made me understand the reasons behind those instructors' behaviours. This isn't to excuse what they did or how they did it, but the why revealed itself layer by layer. In other words, it's not okay that they were indignant in their refusal to help a student get a higher grade—but as a teacher, it's incredibly frustrating to feel like students don't care about anything but grades.

I remember walking into my first class thinking it will be a wonderful journey of growth, then reality comes crashing down with dreadful questions.

"Will this be on the exam?"

"Why did this get a B- when clearly it's at least a B!"

The response to this should never be to become jaded—but that's easier said than done. It requires a surprising amount of internal energy to remember the days you were a student trying to get by with several assignments constantly due at the same time. Once again, as a teacher you have to remember to empathize with the student's why not the how or what. The question about whether it will be on the exam, asked with so much desperation might suck but students are being put under a lot of pressure. They are in courses taught by other jaded lecturers who drone on for hours and give mountains of homework while many have duties to their families to succeed at school.

The adage of walking a mile in someone else's shoes comes to mind and I start thinking about instructional activities that can help with this. Maybe' every student needs to try teaching every now and then. Similarly, maybe periodically every teacher needs to get graded without any opportunity for recourse.

Recently, I got a strong taste for this type of "empathy by doing" from the game "Papers, Please." In it, you are asked to be a customs officer with a sick child, working for a fictional Soviet-style country and your task is to decide who gets an entry visa and who doesn't. That interface is incredibly good at making you feel the drudgery of bureaucratic work under a dictatorship. You try allowing a refugee begging to get into the country without papers when the penalty is no food for your dying son!

Maybe something like this can be the answer to all kinds of misdirected judgement and lack of empathy. Small mini-games that put you in the shoes of the person you find most distasteful, and then you have to proceed to make all kinds of decisions on their behalf. Employees playing middle managers deciding who to layoff. CEOs playing factory workers while being asked to be passionate about the mission. And of course, students playing a teacher figuring out how to tell a student that the difference between a 73% and a 74% isn't going to help them succeed in life.