When I first started doing CWB I was teaching stories in a middle school about ten years ago. The balls had the sole purpose of neutralizing the excessive physical energy of one nervous 13 year old boy whose identity lay out on the football field – such is the way we train boys in our society. I can still see that boy in my mind, so out of place in my classroom and trying to figure out a way to be in class.
I noticed how the restraining device that the child sat in was no match for the energy contained in his body. The restraining device was not restraining him. I knew that I had to do something. So I used the football, since this kid looked like his future lay in being an offensive tackle on the interior line of a pro football team, much like a trainer withholds food from an animal in training it to do what it wants.
So Brigitte then, over the years on the TPRS listserve, people didn’t get that part about the need to restrain the kid because the desk wasn’t working and I could see CWB evolve into something else. The impression on CWB was that I favored athletes and all like that and I quit trying to explain what I said in the above paragraph because it’s kind of hard to explain. CWB became what it became on the list, a kind of washed out version of the original, another reason I prefer the privacy of our group and the clarity of our communication here.
Recently I even made that series of Archie videos with my son to communicate my intention with CWB – it can be accessed on the Video hard link across the top of this page.
Since athletes, especially male athletes, in my classes continued to try to dominate the class for the first week or so and, unless neutralized, are like big lovable out of control bears in class, knocking over – intentionally or non-intentionally – our focus just because they are happiest on a football field, I continued to use the balls.
I was not trying to favor athletes, just get those guys quiet and learning. It worked. When they had “earned” the football after my holding it in front of them and pulling it back until they were listening and doing CI properly, I allowed them to place the ball in front of them on the desk in class with the warning that I would take it the minute it was misused.
Sometimes I would put my hands out in an invitation to throw the ball to me. This is because I like to catch footballs especially those soft nerf balls that are so much fun to throw around, but it is also because if I felt that the kid needed some refocusing I would ask him to throw it to me, then I would throw it to another kid, and so on for a minute or so.
This was really a hidden brain break, because each time that a boy or girl caught and threw the ball, the information delivered up to that point in class would drop down across the hemispheres into the hard drive of the kid’s mind and be taken off the desk top, such is the genius of the brain break, and this is a good place to remind every one that if we don’t do a brain break every twenty minutes, according to the research, we are making a mistake in how the brain processes information.
CWB as a classroom management tool or as a brain break, both are valuable. The kids who read books are not given a book, or if a kid does something other than a sport I don’t give them anything, it’s just not the same. So that is the purpose of the sports balls – mainly to gain power over loud boys in the first moments of class each year.