Lines in the Sand

Last week, our class had a boy dismissed from summer school. “Andy” had simply not taken us seriously when we said that each tardy after the first equals detention or that coming to school the next morning without your lines (punishment) finished also equals detention. By policy, a fourth detention earns expulsion from the summer school. It was more of a mess than it should have been, however, and the principal kept coming back to our classroom to speak with us several times throughout the day. At one point, Moda and I both had to leave the classroom and accompany the principal to the office to talk with Andy’s mother. Understandably, she was upset, and so she put up a fight about it. Apparently, Andy had not been taking his detention slips home, and we did not have copies to show her. The moral of this story: CYA and document your $@#!!

Then on Friday we had another boy cuss me out after I assigned him detention for failure to participate. When Moda escorted him out of the room, apparently the boy kept on running his mouth and even threatened me physically! Afterwards, Moda told me that the boy recently had an uncle pass away. Still, we agreed that circumstances did not excuse such defiance and verbal aggression, so the boy was not back in school this morning.

A year and a half ago, if you told me that my two biggest classroom management concerns would be expelled within my first two weeks of teaching in a new school, I would have said dream on! Now, it just makes me a little sad. Somehow, I could see a small sliver of myself in each of those boys. Moda used to call him an “@$$hole,” but I defended Andy. I guess I found it loveably pathetic the way he used to compensate for his lack of confidence in math by posturing and talking about basketball, the way he would try to get on my good side by making eye contact and asking me out-of-turn questions as I sat to the side, observing other teachers. I take it as a sign of the progress I have made, both as a teacher and as a person, that I can say these things now. Back in the bad old days, I used to resent my “learners” in Namibia so much that I actually dreaded leaving my house most of the time! It took me a long time to learn any better. Now it sounds trite, but it really is all about loving the person, hating the behavior, and not taking any of their bull-$#@! disrespect personally. Because it is not personal. Kids are just kids, loveable in their imperfect humanity.

Recently another Teacher Corps rookie interrupted my interminable rambling to ask me, “What was (so) difficult?” about my Peace Corps experience teaching in Namibia. What was it? Externally, it was the entire culture of the school, the any excuse not to go to class mentality. It was the way my students so quickly figured out that nothing would happen to them if they blew off my detention. The administration was, to put it perfectly bluntly, indolent, inconsistent, and virtually indifferent when it came to discipline issues, or just about anything else for that matter, and the parents were literally a hundred kilometers away in many cases. The students were generally far, far behind where they should have been, academically, so much so that I spent my first week of summer school here in Mississippi in awe of how competent the students are! But my attitude is what made it worst of all.

Today we received a pep talk from Ben, our super- (some would say un-) human program manager, who urged us to be less “polite” with the students. There was some blah-blah about not seeming “weak” and so on. Well, I thought his advice was a bunch of hooey. There is a big difference between being polite and being soft on rules! I raised my hand to suggest politely an alternative perspective, but he refused to take questions until the end of the session. By the time he finished, all I had left to say was, “Do you have any positive feedback to share with us?”

When I first walked into a classroom, all I knew about classroom management was to start off “strict and mean,” but actually I had no idea how to go about doing that, especially when I was literally on my own. I tried very hard not to appear weak, but what happened is that I spent the whole first year feeling mad all the time, because I was trying to assert rules and expectations without a system of consequences standing behind me that I could count on in any way. For lack of a better system, I ended up trying to intimidate the students into submission, which led to several memorable confrontations. Let’s put it this way: More then one broomstick met its demise at my hands that year, cracked hard across desktops. One time, during the lengthy end-of-term exams, when most teachers were huddled in the staffroom ostensibly “marking” their exams while the students ran amok, I found a full-grown ninth-grade boy carrying a stick around the school grounds. Of course, the boy refused to give over the stick, which I considered a weapon. I told him several times in my best, stern teacher voice, “Give me the stick,” but he just stared me down and refused. A crowd gathered. I put my hand on the stick. Still he refused. I continued to tell him to let go. I tugged at the stick, but he held on even harder. It was me against this full-grown boy, locked in a physical battle of wills in the middle of that dirty sandlot schoolyard, with a crowd of a hundred students watching. My heart rate was racing, and the only thing on my mind was not to back down. All this because there was no system, because I did not know the boy’s name, and because I did not want to appear weak.

The other night, a second-year and I made a toast to Ben, to the dismay and chagrin of one of the other second-years. She and I are both former Peace Corps, and perhaps that gives us some of our perspective to see where Ben is coming from. He works hard and expects the same of others. He is totally devoted to Teacher Corps. But he is not there to support us emotionally. He sees rules and order as utterly essential, to the point of coming off heartless. But he is consistent. He listens to ideas and works hard to implement the ones he likes. So what that he reputedly keeps his spare change sorted in separate jars for each denomination? He is who he is, and he is good for Teacher Corps. Even if does he state his opinions as though they are fact.

Bad classroom management is very stressful. It will eat you alive. Prolonged stress ultimately wears away at you, body and soul, eroding the very fiber of your character, until you either flee the situation altogether or you end up doing things you later regret. During my first year of teaching in Namibia, I honestly felt more like a soldier in a war zone than a teacher! For the first time in my life, I felt like I could somehow empathize with the perpetrators of military massacres! I could watch a movie about a Nazi concentration camp and see parallels with how I was handling a group of students, trying to get them to rat each other out! Most of my students hated me, and nobody suffered more than I did.

Here is my thing: There are at least two very wrong paths a rookie teacher can go down. One is to be too reluctant to dish out consequences, out of fear, if you will, or perhaps more accurately, out of misplaced compassion. This is probably the most likely mistake among my colleagues, and so I can appreciate for that reason Ben’s little speech, as wacky as it seems. Another approach, equally harmful, however, is to try the intimidation tack and ultimately end up blaming the students for their chaos and “disrespect.” Both arise out of a lack of clear rules and consequences or the unwillingness or inability to enforce them consistently. Both are bad, bad, bad.

In my evaluation today, Jaws praised my firm, consistent use of classroom “consequences,” in spite of my liberal use of polite language. I have come a long, long way, if I do say so myself.