Raise or Raze?

Moving on to Chapter 2 of Informed Choices by Tara Lockhart and Mark Roberge. I love these journaling suggestions!

Out of all of the numerous tensions that can arise for a teacher, I think the one that really digs deep into my soul would have to be discipline. Teachers all want a classroom where the students just come in, sit down, and participate fully. Yet when these things don’t happen, it can cause the teacher to have to reach into a bag of tricks (or rather a bag of tension) and pull something out to handle the situation.

Sometimes, all a teacher may need to do is “the evil eye” and it works effectively – the student gets back on track and continues working. Those are the good disciplinary students. Sometimes situations call for more demanding measures. Those are the tensions that I absolutely hate and wish I never ever had to deal with again. These situations cause a breakdown in communication between teacher and student, but honestly, it causes a breakdown for every single student all at the same time. Why is it that when a teacher is the most vulnerable, students just seem to erupt in glee/disrespect? Is it because they feel that this is their chance to do something horrendous, something preposterous, something completely wrong? Maybe they want revenge for bad grades? Granted, I’m thinking about teaching middle school, but there were so many days when I had to use “the enforcer” – call the VP. Ours was a Title 1 school with some gang bangers, but calling the police in to support the really tough kids was common (unfortunately).

I would use techniques out of my favorite books on this subject: (Fred Jones, Tools for Teaching; Rick Smith, Conscious Classroom Management) but it would take months (not minutes, not days) to get the students to be respectful and follow classroom procedures and rules. For every hour, I would spend 20 minutes dealing with discipline – either the naughty naughty kind of discipline (calling names in Spanish when they thought I couldn’t understand …uh guys, you say it every day of course I know it by now; calling a classmate to fight; wearing colors that indicate gang representation; throwing things…I could go on); there were the administrative disciplinary actions (no hats, wear uniform, come to class on time, blah blah blah); and then the academic work discipline (do your homework, do the assigned classroom activity). So many things to deal with.

For teachers who have a pleasant time of it and respectful students, there is so much more that you can get done during school but when you are working with troubled youth, so much can break up learning and distract students from learning. I understand that they have bad days, horrible home life situations, stress from other teachers, friends, and a lot of them were really hungry and couldn’t afford breakfast or lunch. My heart ached for these kids. But the tension from the discipline – it could really wreck everything.

I think I have so much confidence when it comes to classroom management, I am able to talk about it with grace (not things that I mentioned above). Having classroom procedures and rules posted from the first day (pictures and written) and be consistent and firm with every single instance. When a teacher brings these things up, hiring panels seem to get it.