Below is a conversation I had with Jason (our Gaelic teacher in Scotland) over the past week. He had asked me for advice about dealing with oppositional kids. I told him to confront the kids in class using jGR and the Classroom Rules, but that may have been the wrong advice, as revealed in the email exchange below. I am asking for input from the group on this. What I offered Jason may not have helped his situation at all.
Jason: [I want} to get back on track with my second year class. I’m going to make a stronger effort to reinforce the rules every time they’re broken and kick out the blurters once they get their three strikes from me. I’m so tired of their attempts to make me look stupid because they succeed. The moment a chink in my armor is discovered, there’s an all out assault for weeks on it and more often than not, they succeed at getting through.
How do you deal with all the sneaky bushfires that some kids light? For example, if a kid yells out sixty nine and then acts shocked when you confront them about it. How do you keep it clear that you’re the boss?
Ben: I think we need to post this. it happens this way to all of us but it sounds a bit as if you have a specially gnarly group. We need to discuss it. I personally CONFRONT with a clearly bitchy edge that kid who said sixty nine.
It’s that time of year again. I have no answers, at the end of the day. I talk and write well about it, but my classes are at times to a certain extent like the one you described. It may be a flaw and a fatal one in this work.
Jason: I’m totally ok with making a post about all this – I hope it sparks some good discussion. As an update, I lost the class for the last time on Wednesday. In a nutshell, I didn’t try to start [a story] until discipline was established. For once.
Within the first few minutes, I laser pointed to the classroom rules, explained yet again why I need them to sit up, and avoided mentioning names while still making very clear eye-contact with the culprits. Some of them straightened up an inch or two but certainly not enough. I dug my heels in and did it all over again, this time modeling how I needed them to sit. I threw in some humor about buying more comfortable chairs if I had the money but refused to move on until everyone was obeying rule #5.
I knelt down to have a firm word with the girl who had been staring into space for the last few minutes. She declared loudly that I was picking on her because “nobody else was sitting up.” When I told her friend to sit up, she asked for a detention so that she didn’t have to be in class anymore, claiming that I “was picking on her as well.” While she was in the hall waiting to be escorted to detention, she decided to make faces through the window while I was speaking to the class.
The two main blurters of the class jumped onboard and the lesson went down like the Titanic. One of my story artists was writing how many minutes was left in the period and displaying it to the class with a smiley face. At least he drew a comical moustache as well!
Enough was enough. I told the class how disappointed I was in their behavior this term – while praising the few kids who had been giving forth great effort and consistently behaving. I acknowledged them with eye-contact and a smile. I plan to thank them personally in the next few days – they really gave it a go. To the class as a whole, I told them that we can’t make a story if we’re not working together and since so many were unwilling to follow the classroom rules, we’d be working out of the book for the rest of the term. As much as I wanted to keep them in the CI river, I don’t want to be burned out by the end of the month. After Christmas, I get the other second year class who is much more positive and motivated. I’m counting down the days until this fresh start!
The one thing I really want to know out of all this is did I pick the wrong battle in the situation above? Did I push too aggressively for compliance with the rules? I feel that had I let them get away with only partially sitting up, it would only be a matter of time before the rules had become meaningless.
Ben: I’ll take this to the group. I don’t think I should have told you to confront those kids. Look what happened!