I got this from an excellent TPRS/CI teacher today:
…today I found myself pissed. I had a great script, was circling, pausing, pointing, going at a snail’s pace, pouring rivers of gold from my heart to theirs, and they wouldn’t receive it. This was one of the few times that I didn’t blame myself for their apathy, indifference, bad upbringing, whatever. I had a moment of clarity when I realized, it’s not me. It’s them….
So, as we get start to go at it again, I would like to point to a truth that I feel few of us accept – that we are in an unprecedented time and what that means to me is that the levels of rudeness tolerated by teachers in schools and by society in general are off the chart.
Blame yourself if you want – teachers tend to do that – but you’d be wrong. When many of your kids:
- have been allowed to be rude in class by other teachers and parents
- haven’t yet sufficiently developed the part of their brain that deals with empathy
- play too many video games
- learn things from YouTube that support unacceptable social behaviors (teens laughing at rape was on the HuffPost front page today)
- don’t really want to be in your class in the first place
- have learned on the deepest of levels that school means only tests and memorization/cheating
and you, failing to remember those things, then blame yourself, then you are making a huge mistake. It really is the kids.
Do you want good classroom discipline? Then learn to do effective CI and HOLD YOUR STUDENTS ACCOUNTABLE IN CLASS TO THE FULLEST EXTENT OF jGR and the Communication Standard. And stop blaming yourself and start to hold the kids to jGR and ENFORCE IT WITHOUT FEAR. We are the ones in authority and we must behave in that way. It’s time to cut out the bullshit on that point.
You may want to announce your increased use of jGR on your class website for this semester. Then, when a parent attempts in a meeting to call you on how their Little Fauntlerette is only getting a C in your class when they had A’s in their language class last year, just refer them to your class website and open up a nice little can of Whoopass on their attack.
You could say, in a surprised voice, “Oh, aren’t you aware of how, this year, I have been forced to align my assessment of your child with the new national Communications Standard? I’m so sorry! Here, let’s just pull that up right here. I guess (Fauntlerette) didn’t make it clear to you how she was being graded this year. Why don’t you ask her about that? Here, let’s look that up right now…”.
I suggest that we all make the second semester of this academic year five months of remembering how rudeness is at an unprecedented high and of remembering that it’s not really us at all, as long as we use jGR as the badass weapon we know it to be.