Sunday Mornings with Jaime & Cathy: Who Holds the Classroom?

The first days of school build more than routines. They build the relational field that determines who feels safe, what meaning can accumulate, whether an IEP can travel, and what students and teachers can access.

This week’s Sunday Mornings with Jaime & Cathy begins with something apparently mundane: my iPhone informing me that school has started because I am suddenly walking 2.8 miles a day and climbing eight flights of stairs. But underneath that logistical change is a much larger one. For the first time, I am working entirely as a push-in RSP teacher, without the Developmental Maths Learning Centre that previously gave my students and me a stable relational home. I am entering other teachers’ classrooms, learning new territories, new expectations, and new relationships—and I realised sometime during the week that I am at Stage 0. I do not yet have scripts for this. I am beginning again.

That experience changed how I watched the first days of school unfold. We tend to think those opening days are about procedures, expectations, bathroom passes, phones, grading, and where everyone sits. But students are also reading the relational field: Does this teacher see me? Can I be confused here? Who gets protected? Who gets believed? What happens when somebody gets something wrong? In August, the classroom has almost no accumulated history, so every interaction carries enormous architectural weight. A teacher learning a student’s name is data. Ignoring cruelty is data. Receiving help without humiliation is data. The field is being built from tiny samples—and that field will shape what students can subsequently make available for learning.

Then the question turned around on me, because I realised that I am reading those classrooms too. Some teachers immediately create a shared field: we are teachers, these are our students, and the IEP is part of how we think about instruction. In other rooms, the RSP teacher may be physically admitted whilst her function is effectively foreclosed—come in, help the student, but do not alter the lesson, pacing, or existing architecture. That exposes a problem with how we sometimes understand push-in special education. Proximity is not a relational field. Minutes in a room do not necessarily produce specialised instruction, continuity, or access. The deeper question is whether the classroom itself can hold the IEP—whether what we know about a student can leave the PDF, enter third period, survive Tuesday, and still change what happens on Friday.

There is another layer to that field for me. I am a trans woman entering other adults’ classrooms, and there are colleagues who will not use my pronouns or with whom I cannot assume that my humanity will be recognised. So I find myself asking some of the same questions students are asking: Am I safe here? Will this person protect my dignity? How much cognitive capacity must I spend monitoring myself rather than teaching? That matters because relational safety is not something teachers dispense to students from outside the system. We are all inside the field. Power is distributed unequally, but everyone’s capacity is affected by what that field requires them to carry. A student monitoring for humiliation is spending attention that cannot simultaneously go towards algebra; an RSP teacher negotiating whether she is permitted to perform her role is spending capacity that cannot simultaneously go towards instruction.

So the question I am carrying into this school year is no longer simply, How do I become good at push-in? It is: How do I make the field portable? How do I bring enough relational continuity with me that Wednesday is still present when I sit beside a student on Thursday, even though we are now in somebody else’s room? Losing my classroom made me realise that I had partly mistaken the room for the field. The room helped cultivate it, but the field was always the accumulated history of recognition, trust, repair, expectation, and meaning. Inclusion does not happen merely because the door opens. Understanding is not complete because the words arrived. The field has to be able to change, and that change has to accumulate—because tomorrow must inherit something from today. Children cannot build an education entirely out of beginnings. Neither can teachers.