Managing Expectations: Lessons from My Twentieth Reading
Books continue to reveal new truths about our lives; even books we have read over and over again...
Something I learned in my second role administrative role was the idea of “managing expectations”. A parent gave me this advice: it doesn’t matter so much what you are going to say - the content of it - it matters more how you deliver it.
Has I been given that advice during my FIRST role as an administrator, I would never have ended up “above the fold”.
Because the real reason the family was so upset with me was clearly not because I had abused their child.
They were really upset because I had, unexpectedly in their eyes, dismissed this child from our school.
You see, this family LOVED our school. And they loved me. They trusted me to come to their house, to drive their child places, and to really be a part of their child’s team.
So when I told them that their child could not return to our school the following year, all hell broke loose.
And this was because I hadn’t managed their expectations.
They weren’t expected their child to be removed from school. They had limited indication this would happen - in their eyes - even though there had been many behavioral problems that they were aware of - this did not translate into possible school removal for them.
They had cast me in a role - the trusted educator, the family friend, the person who drove their child places - and that role didn't include "the person who would dismiss their child from school."
Without gradual preparation for the possibility of dismissal, the announcement must have felt like a betrayal of our relationship itself. I had betrayed their constructed reality.
The book, East of Eden, is what brought me to this thinking.
I have read East of Eden by John Steinbeck more times than I can count - at least twenty - because each time, I come away with a different thought or understanding of something in the book.
And recently, I have come to realize how utterly sophisticated Steinbeck’s portrayal of the character Lee is.
For those East of Eden virgins, Lee is the Chinese-American servant and cook for the Trask family, but he's far more than what he appears to be on the surface.
When we first meet Lee, he speaks in broken pidgin English ("Missy likee tea?") and wears a queue (the traditional Chinese braid). He shuffles around in the expected manner of a stereotypical Chinese house servant of early 20th century California.
But Lee is actually highly educated, fluent in perfect English, and deeply philosophical. He's studied at the University of California and is well-versed in both Eastern and Western philosophy. His pidgin English and subservient demeanor are a deliberate performance - a mask he wears because it's what Americans expect from a Chinese servant, and meeting those expectations keeps him safe from discrimination and allows him to move freely in their world.
Our special education system often demands that our students perform their disabilities in specific, recognizable ways to qualify for services - “managing our expectations”, if you will. We require the dyslexic child to fail repeatedly before intervening. We need the anxious student to have visible panic attacks to justify accommodations. We wait for the trainwreck before we believe the struggle is real.
But my role as a special educator isn't to wait for students to meet our expectations of what disability "looks like." My job is to see past the performance - whether that's the carefully maintained facade of competence or the equally deliberate display of incompetence that some students adopt because they've learned it's the only way to get help.
That family's rage taught me that managing expectations isn't just about avoiding conflict - it's about creating space for the full complexity of a child's experience. It means preparing families for possibilities they don't want to consider. It means teaching colleagues to look beyond the surface performance. And perhaps most importantly, it means showing our students that they don't have to choose between being believed and being capable.
We demand that people perform their suffering in ways we recognize. Just as Americans in Lee's era could only conceive of a Chinese man as either a shuffling servant or a dangerous threat - never as an intellectual equal - we struggle to hold the complexity that someone can be both accomplished and ill, both functional and in agony.
This creates a terrible bind: those who manage to maintain a veneer of normalcy despite their internal struggles are paradoxically punished for their competence. Their very ability to "pass" becomes evidence against the legitimacy of their pain. They must, like Lee, make a calculated choice: reveal their true struggles and risk being seen as attention-seeking, or maintain their functional facade and have their suffering dismissed as fabrication.
If I could go back to that first administrative role, I would have worn my own version of Lee's braid. I would have helped that family see, gradually and gently, that their child's struggles might lead to difficult decisions. I would have managed their expectations not through deception, but through careful truth-telling that honored both their hope and the reality we faced.
Lee eventually trusted Samuel Hamilton enough to drop his pidgin English and speak in his true voice. My failure wasn't the dismissal itself, but that I never created the conditions where that family could hear difficult truths without feeling betrayed.
Now, years later and "above the fold" behind me, I understand that managing expectations isn't about limiting what we reveal - it's about preparing people to see the full truth when it matters most.