Thanks for Not Judging Me

A Different Kind of Space

I walked into the vape pit the way I always did, half expecting to be ignored. The students were already gathered in their usual loose circle, jackets open even in the cold, holding themselves casually, but still aware of who might be watching. Someone nodded when they saw me. Not surprised, not welcoming either. Just an acknowledgment that I was there.

At the time, I was in my third year as principal at a secondary school in a working-class neighbourhood with many racialized students and many students living in poverty.

That space had its own logic. It was where the students who didn’t feel they fit easily elsewhere gathered, whether they were there to vape or just to be somewhere else. They weren’t avoiding school so much as avoiding the parts of it that had already decided who they were. Inside the building, they were watched, corrected, and measured against expectations that rarely fit their lives. Out here, the pressure eased. The scrutiny softened. They could stand with others who shared the same edges and the same sense of not quite fitting the official version of school.

I started going out there when I realised that if I wanted to understand those students, not just manage them, I had to go where they already were.

Learning How to Show Up

I stood off to the side at first. You learn not to enter too quickly. I was always aware that my presence could change the space. I tried to move in ways that did not claim it or reshape it around me. I was still the principal, but that didn’t carry the same weight out there. I had to learn how to be in the space without leaning on it.

The vape pit had its own rhythm, not planned but learned, a quiet sense of where to stand, when to speak, and when to stay quiet. Conversations drifted in and out, never quite loud enough to follow unless you were meant to hear them. Someone laughed. Someone else muttered something I pretended not to catch.

Then one of the boys, a kid I’ll call Marcus, who had spent more time in my office than either of us enjoyed, looked over and asked something that caught me off guard.

“Sir.”

“Yes?”

“Do you ever get sick of it?”

“Sick of what?”

“All of it. The rules. People yelling at you. Being the bad guy all the time, even when you’re not.”

There was something about the way he asked it, and the space we were standing in, that made it feel natural to answer honestly.

“Sometimes,” I said.

He nodded once. I had been honest with him, and he responded in kind.

He spoke about his mother’s shifts at Dollarama. About money. About a math teacher who had more or less given up on him. About the fact that he was pretty sure he was going to fail Grade 10 and really didn’t care.

I remember thinking that this conversation would not have happened in my office. Not like this.

Conversations That Don’t Happen in Offices

In my office, conversations had a structure. Even when they were informal, they were shaped by the room, by the desk, and by the fact that I was sitting behind it and students were sitting across from me. There was always a sense, even when unspoken, that the conversation carried consequences.

The conversation with Marcus felt different. There was no sense that he was guarding himself or choosing his words carefully. He spoke the way people do when they’re not thinking about what might happen next.

Over time, I came to see that some of the most important conversations between administrators and students happened in spaces like the vape pit. Not because it was ideal, and certainly not because smoking was something to be encouraged, but because of what the space did to the interaction. It changed it. Authority was still present, but it was not as heavy or defining.

Slowly, I came to believe that if you wanted to understand students, especially those who were already struggling to belong, you had to be willing to enter spaces like that. You had to accept that you would not be fully in control of how the conversation unfolded.

What Changes in That Space

There is a way to think about spaces like this, places where the usual structure is still there but loosens just enough to change what becomes possible.

That was what the vape pit was. It was part of the school, but it did not operate in quite the same way as a classroom or an office. It didn’t carry the same expectations.

Students stepped into it and something shifted. They were still students. I was still the principal. But those roles loosened slightly. Not enough to disappear, but enough to change how we spoke to each other.

I saw it in the way students talked. Their voices were less guarded, less shaped, closer to how things actually felt.

And it wasn’t just them. I was different there too, less directive, less inclined to steer the conversation toward a conclusion. At the same time, it wasn’t unstructured. There were limits. You could feel when you were pushing too far or stepping in at the wrong moment.

There was something else going on. When people stop feeling like they’re being evaluated, they begin to act differently. When that pressure lifts, even a little, they tend to speak more honestly. In a school setting, especially in an administrative role, that kind of space is rare.

In the vape pit, that pressure eased. I wasn’t there to discipline Marcus or solve his problems. I wasn’t writing anything down. It stayed between us.

So I listened. And because I listened differently, he kept talking.

What I Learned From Those Conversations

When I think back on that moment now, it is not just one conversation. It is many conversations with that same quality, where the space opened, behaviour changed, relationships loosened, and the weight of authority eased. Each of those shifts was small, but together they changed what was possible. Something more honest emerged.

What happened in the vape pit wasn’t accidental. It showed me who school tends to work well for, and who it doesn’t. The formal spaces of school tend to reward students who already know how to perform compliance. Informal spaces often reveal the students who have learned to survive it.

I began to notice that the students who spoke most easily in those spaces were often the same students who struggled the most in formal settings. It wasn’t that they had less to say. It was that the conditions for speaking were different. When the pressure to perform dropped, even slightly, different parts of them came forward. That shift was small, but it mattered.

What that setting showed me was how understanding actually happens in schools. It often depends on entering places where authority softens, even slightly.

Beyond the Vape Pit: Other Spaces That Matter

Over time, I began to see those same conditions in other parts of the school, spaces where the pressure eased and different kinds of conversations became possible.

At my last school, one of those spaces was the Indigenous Studies room.

When I arrived as principal, my predecessor had repurposed a room as a dedicated space for Indigenous students. We had a large Indigenous population, and the room was open throughout the day, supported by courses and a small team of staff.

The group who gathered there became known, informally, as the Thunder Turtles.

Once a week, I paid for a pizza lunch. Students would gather, Indigenous students and their friends, eat, play board games, and spend time in a space that felt like theirs.

I dropped in during those lunches. Not to lead anything, just to sit, play a game, and catch up. The conversations were different from the ones in my office, easier, more open, more honest.

Another space was the computer lab.

In most schools, students involved in athletics, music, or drama have somewhere to go at lunch. But there is always a group who do not fit those spaces. In our school, many of them found their way to the computer lab.

A teacher kept the room open. Students ate, played games, and talked about shared interests in a quieter, less demanding space. I didn’t create it, but I made a point of dropping by, sitting for a few minutes, asking about the games, and just being there. Over time, those small moments built connections that wouldn’t have happened in more formal settings.

There was also a space outside the school.

My last school sat next to a Walmart with a McDonald’s inside. Many students went there at lunch.

I walked over most days, partly to keep an eye on things, but also to be present where students were choosing to go. I got to know the staff, who were wonderfully supportive, then spent a few minutes sitting with students, talking, checking in.

Those conversations felt different again. We were off school property. No desk, no expectation, no immediate consequence attached to what was said.

In each of these spaces, something shifted.

They were not fully outside the school, but not fully inside it either. Expectations loosened. Students had more ownership. The pressure to perform eased.

And because of that, they spoke differently.

The vape pit wasn’t something to replicate. It was something to recognize. These other spaces made that clearer. The question was whether I was willing to notice where those conditions already existed, and to meet students there.

What This Means for Educators

I’m not suggesting that schools recreate the vape pit. But I am suggesting that we pay closer attention to where students actually speak honestly, and how often those spaces sit outside our formal structures.

Those moments are easy to miss because they don’t fit neatly into what we define as teaching or leadership. But they matter. The question is not how to control those spaces, but how to learn from them, and how to create more opportunities where students feel safe enough to speak without immediately being evaluated.

For teachers and administrators, this raises a practical question: where do these moments happen in your own school? They may not look like the vape pit. They might be in the hallway before class, during supervision, or in the few minutes after a lesson ends. The challenge is to recognize those moments and resist the instinct to immediately turn them into something formal or punitive. Sometimes the most important thing we can do is stay in the conversation a little longer without trying to direct it.

Creating In-Between Spaces: Five Practical Moves

The vape pit can’t be replicated, but the conditions it created can be approximated.

Five things that help:

First, wander without an agenda. Build time into your week, even ten minutes a day, to move through the school without a destination or a task. No supervising. No problem-solving. Just be present. Students read the difference immediately. When you arrive somewhere without needing something from them, the dynamic shifts.

Second, let conversations end on their terms, not yours. The instinct in leadership is to close conversations productively, with a next step, a referral, a plan. In informal spaces, resist that. When a student says something real, the most powerful response is often just to stay in it a little longer. No intervention. Just acknowledgment. That restraint is its own form of leadership.

Third, ask one question you don’t need answered. Most of what we ask students leads somewhere, and they know it. Every question has a direction, a purpose, something we’re trying to get to. Every so often, try asking something that doesn’t go anywhere. “How’s your day going?” and then actually leave it there, no follow-up, no pivot to something more useful. It’s harder than it sounds because the habit of having a reason runs pretty deep in most of us who worked in schools. But students feel the difference immediately, the way a question lands when there’s no agenda behind it. And sometimes, without being able to explain why, they answer it more honestly than they answer anything else you ask them.

Fourth, let silence do some of the work. The instinct when a conversation gets quiet is to fill it, ask another question, summarize what was just said, move things along. That instinct is even stronger when a student has just said something real, because it feels like you should respond to it, do something with it. But in these moments, that’s often exactly the wrong move. When a student says something honest, even something small and offhand, just staying with it for a moment, a nod, a pause, waiting, tells them that you’re not in a hurry to get somewhere else. It will feel awkward. That’s fine. Sometimes they keep going, and sometimes they don’t, but either way you haven’t rushed them out of the moment before they were ready to leave it.

Fifth, notice who lingers. Not every student is going to walk up and start talking. Some of them just stay a little longer than they need to, drift past more than once, hang around the edges without quite committing to a conversation. It’s easy to miss if you’re not looking for it, but that kind of lingering usually means something. A comment, even just acknowledging that you see them, can be enough. A lot of the time, that’s actually where it starts, not with the student who comes to find you, but with the one who keeps turning up nearby and waiting to see if you’ll notice.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

What Stayed With Me

I think about Marcus sometimes. That afternoon in the cold, his voice low and unhurried, his hands in his pockets as he talked about things he would never have said across from my desk.

At the time, it didn’t feel like a significant intervention. I didn’t solve anything. I didn’t change his life in any obvious way. But something did happen there.

At the end of the semester, Marcus stopped by my office. He stood in the doorway and told me he’d passed most of his courses, and for him, that was a victory.

“Thanks for not judging me,” he said.

That was all.

And I knew he wasn’t talking about one conversation. He was talking about the way things had shifted between us after that afternoon in the cold, when he realized I wasn’t there to judge him or fix him, just to listen.

The vape pit wasn’t a place I administered. It was a place that existed somewhere in between, where things loosened just enough for something real to happen. I had to learn how to stay and listen there. And that changed everything.

Reflection Questions

1. Where in your school do students speak most freely, and what is different about those spaces?
2. When you enter a space where students feel ownership, how does your presence change it, and what do you do to minimize that shift?
3. Think of a time when a student surprised you with their honesty. What made that moment possible?
4. Which students in your school are most fluent in formal settings, and which are not? What does that difference reveal about how your school is structured?
5. How might you create or protect spaces where the pressure to perform eases enough for real conversations to emerge?

Photo by Basit Abdul on Unsplash