I posted this here in 2008, and am reproducing it here, with a few changes, as it fits in with one of the most important threads here about keeping in emotional and mental balance in the hard work that we do:
If students really don’t care then go the book. But, as it was with me anyway, their not caring is really just the indication that they don’t understand, that I am too random, too fast and not staying within bounds. In short, when they don’t care they don’t understand.
I have experimented with this numerous times, deliberately going what I think is too slow – they always understand and “care” when I do that.
Of course, this is connected to discipline and your expectations of them. When you tell them to listen with the intent to understand, you have to WAIT UNTIL YOU ACTUALLY GET THAT RESPONSE before moving on in class. Just wait. Point to the rule (#1 on the poster) with a patient smile and look at the offender kindly. If one kid is not up and on it, I just stand there and wait. It is a battle of wills and I always win.
The kids HAVE TO respond if I am standing in front of them in silence while 30 people are waiting for them to do that too. I have a kind of humorous “HOW DARE YOU not be doing your job in this class?” Sometimes it is not so humorous. If that one kid wins the mental battle he or she can take ten others with them.
I have spent the last eight years putting my heart and mind around this stuff, excited about being let out of the SICK CAN that is traditional teaching. Why on earth, then, would I allow some kid in a hoodie decide it ain’t for her or him. It always go back to proactive phone calls* to parents in the first month of the year.
How can teachers just let some kid go without getting in their face, perceiving it to be the emergency that it really is? Without action, the slack attitude of one kid will waft like bad air in the direction of the others. Who created this smell in your class? Which kid? Talk to them!
These are not people we are here to entertain. We are here to educate them. These are students and there is a huge difference in that they bear responsibility, or the ability to respond (sorry about that cause we’ve all heard the cliche before, but in this case it is true).
But how can the kids possibly gain this ability to respond unless we inform them about how to respond by telling them – sometimes modeling the behavior we want – about how to sit, when to speak, and generally how to play the game whenever necessary? They can’t just guess at how to behave. My classes now are thirty times more focused now than when I was in the SICK CAN of traditional teaching.
So many kids who look unmotivated really are motivated – someone just allowed them to wear unmotivated looks on their faces and they got to liking it because it was an easy path. No, we are so full of love for them that we can’t even conceive of them feeling like they have permission to be rude in the face of such wonderful and creative stories delivered with such high doses of love just for them and all about them each and every day.
When you say that they really don’t care, I counter that they really do care, they just need a lot of hammer and a little love. Or a little hammer and lot of love. Whatever.
Our students need us to teach them not just the language, but also how to show up with both the adult part of their brains (to compute the language) and the child part of their personalities (to play and laugh during the story), so that things can work in our classrooms, to let the beautiful magic of this method work.
Otherwise, we might as well be back in the SICK CAN of traditional teaching, with all its bored kids and tortured teachers in sick buildings trying valiently but in vain to make it work because it just can’t get up the taxonomy, to the good stuff, the sweet stuff, the human stuff.
A SICK CAN is a SICK CAN and you can’t change that, no matter how many textbooks you buy. The book had its own method of discipline – it kept the kids in line through boredom. We have to do the opposite. We have to keep them in line because they are so involved with actually learning the language that they forget to misbehave. But they can’t do that unless we are clear with the rules and clear and comprehensible, if not compelling, in our speech.
*now they are made in class during FCR