I’ve actually never read a comment like the one reproduced below, and the reason that that is a big deal to me is that over the past 15 years here there have been over 70,000 comments, so this is a rare one! It’s from Carly (Oct. 25). What she wrote represents in my view a breakthrough in the sense that the idea of looking at classes as being different from each other, with different kids in them, and so responding to them differently is just new, and very welcome, bc I think that if we can undo the ‘one-size-fits-all” mentality in our buildings, we will take yet another big step forward in this work. Here is what Carly said:
I am learning something big this year, my 9th in the classroom: I finally understand that I don’t need to manage each class the same way, that each group has a different vibe and needs a different level of firmness or a different style of incentive. Period 1 likes when I am a bit sassy, but students in Period 2 respond very poorly if I push back on them in the same way. Period 2 needs a countdown to quiet, they take the full ten seconds to transition but they do it. Period 7 will do the bell ringer in absolute silence and period 5 will be extremely loud during the bell ringer because they are all talking about it together. This is the first year where I haven’t labeled one of my classes as my “good” class and other as my “bad” class…I can see that they truly are all good, just very different!