It’s a day to day triage of behavior issues and attitudes.  Some days the attitudes and behavior is better than others.  Everyday is extremely taxing.  We’ve reached the end of real consequences.

When a kid doesn’t care if you suspend them, then why would you suspend them?  It’s not a punishment at that point and we must to some extent rely on whips as well as carrots.  That is if we imagine our children are something to be whipped to a greater prosperity.

How does growing up take place?  Is it something to be planned ahead of time in great detail?  Scripting every word to be said was a goal and objective of my initial teacher indoctrination training three years ago.  One of our exams was to script a whole week of lesson plans with standards and scripted “Teacher says/Student says” levels of detail.

That’s nonsense and a waste of time!  How can I plan what the students are going to say to me?  The rougher the students, the less predictable their responses will be.  Today, I was leading a discussion about persuasive strategies and showed a picture of a Target Ad from Vanity Fair Apr 2001 issue. 

The choices for persuasive strategies used were: transfer of emotion to product, loaded words, testimonial, bandwagon, peer pressure and repetition.  I would accept three answers for my first three classes.  The three strategies I saw were: transfer, peer pressure and maybe bandwagon.  In my fourth period, a student pointed out the obvious repetition of the Target sign all over the ad.  I totally missed it and he saw it.

Fourth hour is my lowest class, but when they engage they can be quite creative.  So the question then is what do I do in order to engage them?  They’re out of control at times and lots of time is eaten up with nonsense.  And from this description, you might imagine a teacher out of control or a classroom full of students producing spurts of chaos.

It only takes about six, apparently Tourette’s-Syndrome prone, children at any given time to shut down a lesson.  What am I to do?  Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that in a whiny tone.  Rather, I’m inquiring about a serious question.  What am I to do?  I can respond to student misbehavior aggressively and seek to shut misbehavior down immediately.  I track the misbehavior concisely and nobody slips through the cracks.  In the process, the students grow to hate or accept the system.  The more aggressive students fight the system and then it comes down to a percentage game.

Are there too many to expel them all?  After all, the school does make its money based on head count.  So if too large a portion of your head count is tied up in problem children, at some point cost benefit analyses start taking place and dollar signs get involved.  When you get to the point where a student doesn’t care whether they’re suspended or not, and administration is giving out second chances, how far can consequences realistically push? 

You’ve got detention.

I’m not going.

Then you’ve got two detentions.

I’m not going.

Then you’ve got Saturday school.

I’m not going to that either.

Then you’re suspended.

Good.

The thought process is one of pushing away those people who are trying to help you.  Responding to this childish cry for help with aggression is often, I think, misperceived by the child as someone ‘not liking them.’  At the cynical age of 12 or 13, someone not liking you may result in a student increasing their bad behavior in your classroom.  Some people will be quick to shoot me down here and say it’s not about the kids liking you and to an extent I think that’s true.

I don’t need to be friends with my students to teach them.  I shouldn’t be friends with my students because the relationship could ruin the classroom culture.  However, that doesn’t mean my relationship to my students should be a rigidly status driven interaction or one of simple rewards and consequences.  Somewhere in the space of being a classroom Nazi and having the classroom out of control there’s a space for creating an environment where students talk and the teacher interacts with them.

I think my students will learn because they’re encouraged to speak, but encouraging them to speak means hearing all kinds of things.  The things they talk about with each other.  So the conundrum is how to encourage speaking while discouraging inappropriate speaking.  It seems that this must come through in communication.  In someway the student must internally understand why they should be productive rather than destructive.  That’s part of the education they need to learn on their own and I can only point them in a direction.

I exert authority when the situation has moved beyond simple warnings and one-on-one conversations.  We are in times of questioning authority though.  What is the right way to move a student forward?  Shall we climb on their backs and whip them like horses to finish the race?  Is it possible to encourage original thought and self development that way?  I’m going to try to produce something like original thought through conversation again this year and cross my fingers that my students will develop enough to pass the AIM’s test. 

Because passing a multiple choice test is the ultimate goal from the state to my school for what my students should know by April.