This is from TPRS in a Year! –
Josh is cool. There is no way getting around it. If I pay attention to that fact, I will feed it, but if I ignore it, his coolness will get out into the room somehow anyway, in more subtle ways. Either way, the fact that Josh is cool will draw my students’ attention away from me and what I am trying to do in my class. It’s just that way with some of those cool kids.
In fact, Josh’s job is to not just be cool – it is also to invite some of the other kids in the room to try to be cool as well, with him as the lead cool person. Kind of a section of the classroom whose job it is to be cool and draw attention to themselves in spite of what we want to do in our lesson. Josh wants employees.
That puts me and Josh into conflict. We both want the kids to work for us. Who will be in charge of my classroom?
Early in the year last year, Josh scored critical points with the wannabe cool kids when he repeatedly answered “sixty-nine” to many of the questions I asked about how many of something there were. He was so funny when he did that. All you had to do was look at him to figure that out.
But only the cool kids got Josh’s humor! Josh thought that day that his sixty-nine joke was new, and that his teacher certainly could never had heard such a funny joke before in class. What a cool kid!
Josh really thinks that only the cool kids who wanted to work for adn with Josh in class got his joke. He thinks I didn’t get it – otherwise I would have laughed. Very cool. Josh had established his own little “under the radar” dirty joke file to share with the class whenever he could fit one in, which seemed to be his main focus in class.
Later in the year, I made a story out of a Jacques Prévert poem called Page d’Ecriture, about a boy who sits bored in math class and calls through the window to a bird to come play with him. In that class, Josh hit back-to-back home runs.
First, he made an original play-on-words on Prévert’s last name, gaining the admiration of his peers. He just reversed the first “r” and the first “e” and then retreated into silence. When I looked at him he had an innocent look, a slight smile, but the class was laughing hard. Home run.
And then, his next chance, he hit another home run! When I wrote down and translated the words “Joue avec moi, oiseau!”/”Play with me, bird!” Josh repeated the first three words in English, in mock astonishment, winking at two guys, who took their cue immediately and also said those words as well, all three breaking my admonition against using English in my classroom.
What to do? I really didn’t want to interrupt the flow of the class. I said to myself that I would deal with it later. But with this last line, Josh was invisibly but officially recognized by those in the know as really very, very cool. Josh was having a hard time concealing how cool and funny he was, and it was only October when that happened.
When I didn’t react to Josh’s second home run comment, he knew he had me. It was a line shot, a home run I didn’t even see leave the park, a bullet, and it made me look pretty much like a fool in front of my class. I didn’t react to Josh because I had to focus on more serious things, the subject matter I was teaching. I thought, maybe if I focus on the poem, these problems will go away. Poetry has always been a source of solace to me.
The only thing was, my job in those moments of intolerable rudeness was not to focus on the subject matter and ignore the kids at all. It was to focus on the offending kid, the bully, and bring in the subject matter only secondarily. What could I have done differently?
I actually had three good chances to strike Josh out, that one time in September and two more on that fateful day in October, when the fate of my class was sealed for the rest of the year. But I missed those three chances, and the rest of the year, because of my failure to engage Josh in the moment he made those three comments, was very emotionally difficult for me, as well as for the kids who really wanted to learn, and, truth be told, for Josh himself, who was searching hard for someone in his life to show up as an adult.
Why didn’t I CONFRONT Josh in front of the class? Why didn’t I tell him that unwanted comments of any nature are considered a form of teacher harassment and will not be tolerated?
Kids need guidance. My view is that the first time a teacher hears an inappropriate comment from a kid, no matter how seemingly innocuous it is (the kids are experts at making seemingly innocuous comments), then the teacher needs to say something, to react, to announce to the class in general – not singling Josh out in class but addressing the obvious in a general comment – that they will not tolerate any behind the back sly comments of any kind, and also to speak to Josh privately and definitely make a phone call to his parents.
The teacher is the adult in the room. For storytelling to work for us, we must act like adults. No teaching method can work without strong and active classroom management. Josh, with his off color comments, is begging you to straighten him out, so he, too, can learn the language you teach.