Have You Ever Felt an Ambivalent Feeling Towards Your Students?

Many teachers experience that the 'being tried out' in a new class in mainly done by just one 'rebel' or a small group of them. An experienced teacher knows that his future relationship with the class will depend on the 'successful' solution to the problem that the challenge of the 'rebels' poses, and that this in turn depends on his ability to find a solution which will control the rebels' feelings without rejecting them. Often teachers link this phenomenon to the specific difficulties of these 'rebels'.

It is generally true that difficult students or 'rebels' have a number of problems. However, teacher will also notice the interest and the fascination with which the whole class watches the developments of these challenges.

This may be largely connected with the fact that these 'rebel' are also expressing the feelings of the other members of the class. In this way they can experience the feelings, but need not bear the consequences of their actions, that is, they need not feel guilty about their behavioral. Observations of behavior patterns in small adult groups demonstrate how frequently this phenomenon occurs.

Small groups have been studied over many years. Morris, a distinguished researcher, gives a very full account of the different kinds of small groups and their relevance to education. The other researchers describe their own experience with small groups in this field. Their work is manly based on another researcher, Bion's hypothesis. They extend these ideas directly to school classes.

The interrelationship within classes at school at school is, of course, not identical to that within a small group in which group members can easily interact with each other. There are too many pupils in each class to make this intimate ace-face relationship possible. However, on account of the familiarity of the members of the group a school class cannot be classified as a large group either. Yet some of the phenomena that are observable in large groups seems to contribute greatly to the understanding of the interrelationship in a school class.

Apart from Freud's original work, psychoanalytically oriented studies of large groups as contrasted to small groups are fairly recent. For instance, psychoanalyst Turquet, in an unpublished paper, points to the very special conflict of each member of a large group between retaining his own identity and merging his identity with that of the large group.