A recent thread here has helped me formulate my approach to discipline next year. It is a concrete response to kids who misbehave and it has teeth in it. This is the first of three posts that address how I plan to implement discipline next year. Another poster will be required to implement this change. That poster will appear in the third of three posts here over the next few days. They are long but extremely important posts. I can’t underestimate what this new poster, which works hand in hand with our current Classroom Rules (2010) poster, might do in the area of classroom discipline next year. The poster will be a Consequences Chart that will hang on the wall next to the Rules Chart. It is soft to have a rules chart up in our classroom but no consequences chart up there to use when the rules are broken, so this addresses that deficiency. The rambling was a necessary part of getting to this change,so forgive the obvious need for editing. The basic point is clear in the third of these posts, the one with the teeth in it. It will appear tomorrow. Some things Robert has written here this past week about how the interspersonal skill is an academic skill will be incorporated into the final poster. So, below is the first of the three lengthy discussions that I view as the biggest hammer that I have ever brought to the classroom discipline discussion. The big concern is that these three posts don’t scroll out on us and that we keep this Consequences Chart from being forgotten in what is becoming a very loaded plate for next year, especially in terms of posters. We can remember.
At this time of year, I hang in there with the CI. I work with individuals, move kids, and just won’t give up. My goal is a quiet, focused atmosphere where I am relaxed and they are hearing/reading with respect. It is a huge topic, and I’m not making claims that I succeed all the time. We are in our last ten days and Annick and Barbara and I decided yesterday that if we can teach at Lincoln, where disengagement and the inability to show up in class as a human being is a striking feature of a background of poverty, then we an teach at any high school in the land. Yes, we have ourn bail out moves listed here on the site, but ultimately I have decided that I won’t let them win. We live in a society that is laughable in what it has allowed children to think about adults, they bring their opinions of adult males as Homer Simpson or that dad on Malcom in the Middle and countless others from TV – all jokes – and expect to win over us, bc they win in other classrooms, but my message back is that they will not win, those six kids or whatever, depending on the group. I will actually work with only one kid with the CI. One of my classes – it is still washing off the poison from those two pig kids that prompted all those pig posts in the middle of the year – is still tough, and yesterday, with kids all over the building in a semi-out of control state, I just taught to three kids. We had great CI, and the others were basically told by me in the invisible world with glances and confrontations to shut up while I worked with these three kids who wanted to work. I love saying how inept I am at this stuff. It’s honest. I suck at CI, and we all suck at CI. Let’s get over that and just admit it. Few are the days when we fly. Many are the days when we don’t fly. But my point is that we suck at it bc of the kids and we think it’s us. It’s all toxic, but John I would like to talk you into finding how cheerfulness can be a supreme tool in our ongoing attempt to make this work. Cheerfulness is the goal word in this discussion. Cheerfulness takes us above the smell and into good teaching. That is the main thing I have learned from Annick this week. We rise above their bullshit with cheerfulness, we send kids out if we have to, keep making the parent calls. But cheerfulness is hard for us to bring in as a response bc if we are to be truly cheerful in our teaching, we would have to be cheerful with ourselves and that means actively loving ourselves and giving ourselves permission to not be perfect with the CI and for many of us that is hard. We judge ourselves and find ourselves to be lacking and the kids sense that and go off on us. This game is really about loving ourselves and forgiving ourselves and letting a power much greater than ourselves take over in the hard moments of teaching. I know that seems like a long way from the topic, but it’s not. Rather, cheerfulness and trusting in the flow of the CI is at the core of this issue. If we can just realize how hard this work really is, and how poorly equipped our kids are to even properly interact with us bc the society they are growing up in is mad, out of control with confusion, then something will happen in our classrooms. We will get it. We will see that, instead of running away from using CI in those moments of fear, we embrace the fear and keep our hands on the CI rudder, we steer through the storms. CI is actually code for a way of bringing the higher human qualities of patience, compassion (for ourselves and others), and forebearance into our classrooms. Today I have a date with my 8th period class. Many in there, ruined by the pigs, will not want to work. It’s May and they don’t want to do anything. But I do. I want to talk about that guy Brandon in Le Nouvel Houdini and I will do it and some kids will come with me and I won’t have to do that Blaine cop out of handing them the grammar books. This work requires faith and cheerfulness. We should say that before inviting people to our conferences and trainings. Look at the teachers who reject us by the thousands. Many of them – not all – just don’t want to do this work of learning how to try to communicate in a loving way with those whom we cannot love, of keeping a smile on our lips even thought our hearts be torn to bits. Who would? Very few. Much easier to tell them to turn to page 93 and be done with it. It is messy work, and too big a topic to even go into here, but no child or group of children is going to make me stop doing CI. Can’t do the cheerfulness thing? Of course you can’t. We can’t bc we are human and scared bc the world is falling apart right in front of our eyes. So what is the option? To go around with a bitchy edge complaining about all the slackers in our buildings? Great. Try that for ten years. Watch yourself burn out. I’ll pass. I am going to start realizing that I won’t succeed at comprehensible input until I bring the cheerfulness piece into my classroom and trust it to work. CI is really code for Cheerful Input. Only when you bring that can you have the comprehensible input. So, bring it. And let the fear go – it’s not helping any of us. It stokes rudeness in our students. Why would we do that?
