1000 Empty Check Marks: The EDSE 600 "Stick to Your Guns" Blog

So Ben asked us to apply our classroom consequences “every time” for two weeks and then blog about the results. The thing is, I really do apply my consequences (and, to an admittedly lesser extent, rewards) pretty consistently—at least in name. This has never been a problem for me. The problem lies in the secondary consequences.

At the beginning of the year, my assistant principal encouraged me to write the students up if they refused to do the punishments I assigned them. So I did, and those students got ISS. The students resented me at first, but I got off to a pretty good start laying down the law and asserting order in my classroom. Then about halfway through the first nine-week term, I found a letter in my box from the same assistant principal. The gist of the note basically implied that I was not really doing my job, like the other teachers, because I was sending the students to him without calling the parents or doing other interventions first. I guess he felt I was putting the burden of parent contact on him. Fair enough, I suppose.

It is hard to explain what happened next. In a word, I failed. I was already feeling pretty guilty about not contacting my students’ parents from the very beginning. Then my telephone phobia kicked in for real, and the inertia, the enormity of the task before me, and the burden of the guilt itself all combined to paralyze me, and the one, main thing I did not do that I should done all along got even worse. I stopped writing the students up for ignoring my primary punishment, and ever since then, there has been a slow decline in my classroom management. The decline has been slower than you might think—in part because I was doing a lot of other things well, I think—but still a decline. Another thing that partially saved me was the fact that most of the students who got a lot of check marks beside their names in class were the same ones who would just carry on and on until they did something that deserved a straight office referral outright.

I have spent all this school year feeling pretty rotten about this one failure on my part. I stopped blogging for a while. (What was the point? Wallow in guilt for the whole world to see?) And by the way, you might think that the first phone call is the worst, but not really. The second and the third and the fourth phone calls require just as much effort to overcome whatever it is—my phobia? my inhibition?—as the very first one. Every day, I would get home, crash, forget about work for a while, then before you knew it, it would be too late to be calling people, then I would go to bed, get up in the morning, get ready for class, teach teach teach, until it was time to come home, crash, and then start the cycle all over again. It was so easy to put it off, day after day. Anyway…

So when we got this assignment, I knew what I was supposed to do. In order to carry out my consequences, I need to be calling parents. If they STILL refuse to do the punishment required, then I can write them up. Results? Well, I just now called half a dozen parents. We’ll see how it plays out from here. Did you see that? I just called half a dozen parents! And it went alright. Major victory for me! Now, I’ll be the first to admit I should have done this a long, long time ago. But hey, that’s a start, right? It almost amounts to a moral victory at this point, since (being on 4x4 block schedule) there are really only about three weeks left before I start all over with a new group of students. Hopefully, I can proceed in this vein of overcoming a deep personal inhibition on so many levels and carry this small bit of momentum into next term. And who knows? Maybe the seventh phone call will be slightly easier. Sort of like answering tech support phone calls for a living was panic-inducing for the first month or so, then routine after that.