This is an edited repost from October and I think an important one:
In my opinion the main area of work and focus for some of the newer people to this group and this work is the side talking. WE can’t allow it. I did for the first 10 or so of the 13 years I have been doing this work and I do think it takes years to find whatever it is within us that is able to once and for all stop such behavior in its tracks in our classroom.
What’s the first thing we must do to get the side comments stopped? In my opinion we must find that certain something – a quality of spirit within us – that stops kids from talking in our classrooms while we are teaching. I would ask, what quality in us prevents us from confronting children who talk in our classes? It is some kind of low grade fear, and, unless we stop the kids every time, in every single instance, by pointing to the Classroom Rules poster, then we will fail in this work.
Let’s be clear on this point. The answer to the problem is to stop the first blurt and refuse to go a step further into the class we are teaching. It’s like a series of very small brush fires in the field we are standing in. If we don’t stomp out the first one we will soon have a classroom that is burning up all the comprehensible input. The conflagration will make us want to quit teaching, and there is no reason for that.
Comprehensible input is directed straight at the unconscious mind. There is no focus on anything analytical, the words, the parts of speech, etc. All the input is processed unconsciously and the focus is on the meaning. But if we allow side talking the unconscious mind can no more do its work of processing the new input than a person can watch a movie in a crowded theatre in which everyone is talking leisurely out loud about other things.
I know that the reason I made that Classroom Rules poster in the first place was because of my own earlier experiences with blurting and side talking. All the work I was doing, all the intense passion for trying to make this way of teaching work in my own classroom, all of it hinged on enforcing the Classroom Rules with the laser pointer at each single offense, every time, with every kid, in every class, without overlooking one kid, ever.
Once I started truly enforcing those rules, my life changed in this work. I just had to learn to smile patiently, wait, point the laser at the set of rules on the wall, look at the kid, expect the change, and, if it was not forthcoming, pursue that kid via phone calls, conversations in the hall, looks during class that had a bitchy edge inside my smile somewhere, and then, when it happened again, do it again. And then again the next day.
As I found my own personal power in this way, with my laser pointer and the Classroom Rules (see the posters page of this site on the TPRS Resources page for that), my classes started to actually work. All I had to do was find my personal power over a bunch of children. I think that I forgot, maybe because some of them were physically bigger than mine, that they were just children. That is a mistake I will never make again.