It’s glaucoma. That is the illness that the kids mocked in their teacher in my DPS colleague’s classroom. It has happened several times this year. Everything has to be magnified for him. There are things lying around on the floor that he can’t see. Lots of candy wrappers, books, you name it. Things on the level of grape soda on the floor all the time.
I liken the stuff on the floor to the emotional junk that litters our own floors. Most, if not all, of us are, to some degree, to varying degrees, caught up in what is now an epidemic of entitlement abuse now spewing from the mouths of American students. Many teachers have a kind of emotional glaucoma and cannot see what is really happening in our classrooms in terms of what is proper respect for adults in a classroom.
My colleague confided in me that the kids who mock him make comments like, “Why don’t you just take your medicine, mister?” (They must think that glaucoma is like diabetes, which can be controlled through drugs). This kind of comment reveals much about our society, almost too much. It is unacceptable.
In my own internal awareness over the years of using this blog to further understand myself as a person and as a teacher, from the thousands of things said here over those years, I have come to understand that there is now a great need for us to learn to respond emotionally as fully functioning adults to bullying from children.
The need to address bullying of teachers by children is a professional need that is off the chart in importance in our country. Yet, it is a need that is largely ignored. Teachers are under a kind of constant emotional threat from higher ups that they must be all things to all people and yet accept compensation that does not reflect that request. Teachers seem to be under a kind of spell.
Since teachers are being targeted from two places, from above and below, from both students (and the unconscious parents that are raising them) and from administrators, we must now learn how to respond to these forces.
In those moments when children use their mouths to mock, insult, control, or put us down , and in those all too common moments when administrators overstep their limits with us in what is merely a job, we must now act.
Our acting as victims is what we will now turn our attention to here in this PLC. If a kid goes off on the teacher and the teacher hears it and other kids hear it, we will know exactly what to do. Everything else will then have to stop until that kid has been stopped.
We will learn to stop the kid’s mouth in its tracks. Our reactions will be swift and sure. Our phone calls will find their mark. No one will cross us, least of all a kid. Who else will stop these out of control children? Goofy?
I am in a kind of disbelief that we would roll over on things like this. I’m sure that your own reaction was strong on this Robert, and I don’t mean to imply here that they weren’t, but the Great Grape Soda Incident and the Glaucoma Outrage are both now fully on my mind – I don’t see where the blog discussion should meander ideally through the remaining weeks of school without our turning our full attention to this issue.
We can make a plan, and we will use our current kids to practice for next year on classroom discipline. How, specifically, do I intend to steer the group discussion now into this area? I’m glad you asked. Here is what I suggest we do to arrive – as soon as possible (no later than June) – at a written Emotional Emergency Response Plan (EERP) for the 2012-2013 academic year:
1. Please try to avoid discussion that does not address EERP here until we have the (possibly postable) EERP document we want. Please – for the next week or so – don’t comment on other posts, just to keep our focus on this critical issue. As I said, this is a fifty alarm fire, and we are going to respond to it and not let it burn down our classrooms and us with it.
2. All group members currently reading the blog are asked to supply one idea to help create this new document. Anything. Just write it and send it in as a comment below. This is a chance for more than the fifteen people who always write here to contribute to the group discussion. It is also a way for us to at least know your names. Sometimes I think that, although 80 people are members of this group, only about 20 read it regularly. Everybody sends in one suggestion. We will create the document from, hopefully, 80 single ideas.
3. Shouldn’t we all just be able to do our things with classroom discipline? One might ask that question. My response is no. We clearly need to have a document. We will craft it together and we may even be able to use it as we use our rules poster (2010). Maybe we can even post the document – just thinking aloud here – so that all can see our intent and our specific plan of action when rude kids cross our boundaries – often with extreme skill – in class. So that everyone knows what will happen if they do that. To set some boundaries.
4. Ben, aren’t you overeacting? Some of us are just fine on discipline. My answer is again no – we can always get better at discipline. I am feeling that we are all liars about this. I feel that the culture of entitlement and rudeness on the part of kids in our society in general right now is completely out of control. We will act to create a document that we can immediately put into action the instant we need it. We will write it together and it will be real and it will be effective.
5. Here is an example of one specific idea for the document – it is my contribution: When I learned from Abbey Parks about how she has all the kids in the area of the room who can see a fist clarification request from an individual student during CI mimic the action (which to me is the #1 new idea in TPRS for 2012) I realized that we can do the same thing for discipline infractions where teachers are outwardly insulted.
In that idea for the new EERP document, the kids become the real police force. Up until this point, students have never been allowed to react to bullshit comments directed at teachers from individual kids because that has been the culture. Kids were simply not allowed to act in this way. We need to change that.
This must be done very carefully and with much tact. The kids must not be able to say anything – just make some kind of sign of objection, like the fist move. The kids need to be able to perhaps look at our EERP Guidelines on the wall and make some t move to indicate their objection to the group that a kid has just crossed a boundary with anyone else in the classroom, including the teacher.
Then, if other kids show their agreement, then everyone in the room, except the perpetrator, is taking responsibility for the emotional safety of everyone else. This kind of work reflects the metacognition work that we have just ironed out for next year to be done at the end of each class, only this time it can happen at any moment and represents a kind of meta-emotional work being done by the group for the protection and safety of all. That is my offering to the new yet unwritten EERP document.
6. There are currently 35 blog posts in the queue. I will push them all back until next weekend. The floor is yours on this topic only. I will expect all teachers to participate in this week’s efforts to now fully turn our attention to something far mor important than discussions about how to get better at teaching using comprehension methods. Then, in the first week of April, we can craft the document, and then, after that, I will release the blog topics back into general discussion.