When I was in college, I was often told: Don’t smile until after November. The reason behind this is that in order to have effective classroom management, your students need to know that you mean business. What they don’t tell you is that it’s difficult to do that when you cycle up with the students.
When you cycle up with your students, the students know you. They think that they know every single quirk about you. After November, you start to relax, and they see you smile.
I love my kids from last year. I developed a great rapport with them, and I’ve seen many of them mature. With that said, I had to raise my voice this past week. I had to raise my voice several times. I don’t like doing that because it makes me feel like I’m out of control, and it makes me realize that my patience has dissipated. None of which are great.
There is a straw that broke the camels back. For me, I found that straw in my 2nd period class.
I started out my year by spending 2 weeks teaching procedures. Procedures that I planned to use for the rest of the year. Unfortunately, they forgot those procedures after a month. I asked my students to pass their bellwork folders to the back of the class, and they took this as free time to run all over the class and whoop an’ holler. I had given the instruction to start their writing after they passed folders back, and I walked to my desk to grab my things for writer’s conferences to take to my small group table. As I sat down to pull out my clipboard and some notecards, chaos ensued.
I. Lost. My. Cool.
My A.P. heard me yelling from her office and came to see what was wrong. I never yell. I will raise my voice above the clamor, but I don’t yell and scream. I had raised my voice to get above the din and asked them to sit down and be quiet 7 times. Then, I lost it.
I told them that they had absolutely no respect for me, themselves, each other, or the school. I told them that I expected better of them than that. They were not in Kindergarten. They were middle school students. They knew better.
But they don’t.
They thought they knew me. From last year.
But they don’t.
I had to seriously rethink my entire career in that moment. Did I really want to continue teaching in that stressful environment? An environment that was harmful to my health and well-being?
I say this because my blood pressure immediately rose, and I had a cardiac event in that moment. My chest hurts to think about that day. It was an unhealthy environment. It remains an unhealthy environment. And I think to myself that parents would be appalled to know how their children act at school. If my children ever did something like that? They would be sitting in a room with nothing but their own thoughts after a paddling.
What has happened to the youth?
