So if you are new to the group don’t forget that what we do when we run into problems in class (this group is focused now in August and September on our Classroom Management 101 homework) is simply email the problem to me at benslavic@yahoo.com and we talk about it. Three group members are currently working on bad blurting issues. Here is one of them:
Hello Ben,
I had a great start of the year, but I also had a few challenging days with some of my classes.
Whenever they were talking, I went to the board, pointed to #2 and quietly waited, smiling until they stopped. This worked for the first week. The second week, one of my students, while I was on the board pointing to #2 said to me why are you smiling and the whole class began to laugh.
I continued to smile while pointing to #2. The class stopped laughing but this student continued. I walked towards him, non-confrontational, looked at him and smiled. He became very uncomfortable and stopped. The student next to him who has Autism (undiagnosed) continued laughing. I ignored him for the time being and continued teaching. He stopped laughing.
I contacted the student’s mom (the one who started the laughing in class, who has an IEP. Mom thinks he is acting this way because its 7th period and I demand too much of him and maybe he needs to be switched to another class period. The next day he was fine.
My autistic student started laughing and disrupting the class, so I repeated what I did with the first student the day before. He became uncomfortable and yelled, “Why are you looking at me smiling? Stop looking at me! What did I do? etc. He stopped. I kind of felt I won the battle.
Now, my biggest problem I had this week was during OWI. I lost my class. We had a short schedule, so I went straight to OWI to create the character. I lost control of the class. First, they do not know how speak one at a time and I went to the board several times and pointed to #2 but not enough.
It was chaos. Can you give me some ideas on how to handle OWI? I definitely need to reread the section, but where did I go wrong? Thank you so much for always answering my questions.
BTW, the autistic student dropped my class. He does not need it to graduate.