This is a republication of an article that addresses the recent discussion about how to deal with recalcitrant kids. Note that it doesn’t deal with that specific kind of hostile silence we were talking about last week, but rather the brain dead kind of responses we see all too often:
If a student refuses to try, we must switch the discussion right to them. This is true no matter what the topic. Often, we can engage kids because of the brilliance of circling within simple PQA and stories, but sometimes, especially during reading classes where the conversation is more general and therefore more difficult for the kids, we run into recalcitrant kids and it can really stymie us.
In those moments we use English too much. We jump the mud puddle instead of wading through it with these kids who all of a sudden, upon being asked a question, act as if they were born without a brain. Our first reaction is to bail, but we must not. Our second reaction is to get pissed at the kid, but we must hide that. Here is a plan: Stay with the question. Nothing else. Painstakingly write everything you say on the board in both languages. Point to, pause at, and then circle.
In one class I’m embarrassed to say that the sentence that most of them looked at me blankly on was, “What page are you on?” (In SSR they were all on different pages.) But I didn’t bail to a dication. I stayed in the moment. I felt the burn. I made myself understood. I spent a long time on that question. Why? Because it involved each one of them. They couldn’t hide from that question. I didn’t care about personalizing the discussion in an imaginary (much more fun) way. Instead, I just asked each kid what page they were on at the end of the SSR period.
The fourth kid was the space cadet. I pinned him down with the same circled question the first three kids had answered successfully. I fought with him in the invisible world. Every single kid in the room saw the wrestling match and wanted to know who was going to win. They expected me to bail and I didn’t. I went so painstakingly slowly that it was really uncomfortable for everyone. Finally, the kid communicated that he had understood. I had won.
This kid did me a favor. He forced me to go really slowly. During this too long period of CI, we got a good review of numbers and a nice bunch of reps on “sont/are” bc two girls were both on page 41. There were periods where, if a kid wasn’t with me, fiddling with the desk or something and looking down, I just walked over to the board and wrote down, “I will wait” in French, with the English right next to it, and then I sat down on a table or in a desk and just waited.
The thing about that battle with that space cadet is that most of us just cut and run when faced with kids like that. But we can’t do that, because this is real passive aggressive behavior and it can absolutely ruin our classes.
Those moments when we try to engage them in a pleasant way in the TL and they just stare at us are real and we must respond in the moment and not bail by going to another students with the question. Our mistake is that we don’t see the situation as critical. We just think that the kid somehow can’t understand what we are doing and we usually just skip away to some other kid. I am advocating here that we stand our ground with such kids and make them understand.
There are three benefits to doing this: 1. We reach the kid from a position of strength. 2. We switch the feeling of being weak and exposed back to the kid. 3. We send a loud message to all in the class that we are the authority and if they don’t want to be exposed like that they better pay attention.
And it is simple to do. We write the same question on the board, in my case above “What page are you on?” and we just start doing yeoman circling from the beginning of the sentence. In this case, I had said “You are on what page?” and so I started in with this kid (I was ready to go the full 30 min. to the end of the period if necessary with him) and pointed and paused to “You are…” on the board and just went into a massive slow motion thing until he got it.
That took about five minutes, because the first three were his time to resist. But when he finally got that I wasn’t going away, he caved. Yeoman circling – try it, you won’t like it but it can save your classes. Our kids always understand and grasp less of the CI than we think, and we need to do this kind of siege warfare more often anyway to make sure that the inmates aren’t passively running the prison.
This stuff is so hard. I admire my colleagues who try to teach this way. My colleagues who try to teach this way are warriors.