What other behaviors does this oppositional student exhibit with other students during class? Those whom he can reach and bring into his orbit – if the teacher lets him – are only a few of the kids affected by kids like this. But all the kids in the class are affected.
The students who want to succeed and show up for class because the class is set up for their success are left with cold stares from the oppositionally defiant kid. I have seen, on a daily basis, one of these students stare down kids who try to succeed.
As those who have followed this thread know, this student and his henchman are gone now, at my insistence, but when this was happening it was rough, rough, rough. It didn’t help that this kid was a junior in a class of largely ninth graders and a few tenth graders. Such students have a devasting effect on the students who want to succeed because there is a threat in the eyes of an upperclassmen that is visible to the younger kids.
Other ways that kids like this behave at great harm to the group manifest in excessive, almost daily, trips to the bathroom, which disrupt class, not to mention fidgeting with anything available like coins, pencils, other small objects, the desk itself.
We know that our success with comprehensible input depends on how well we enforce the nothing on desks rule. Since in level 1 we write much less than we talk we have that rule of prime importance that says nothing on the desk (including students who put their heads on the desk as part of their passive aggression).