From the beginning, I've struggled with classroom management. How do you get those squirrely little 8th graders to behave? Those theory classes from college didn't even begin to prepare me for the real-life battle field of the classroom. Well, a few years ago I had this class from h-e-double hockey sticks. 7th period. 8th grade Language Arts. All of them best friend juvenile delinquents. They had already made me burst into tears in the middle of class twice that year. So, one night I'm in bed trying to drift off to sleep so that my alarm clock won't come as such a complete surprise in a few hours, but thoughts of this class keep drifting through my mind. Just as I was about to fall asleep, an idea came to me, a vision, if you will. And the next morning I put it into action, thinking that this perhaps was one of the best ideas I had ever come up with. Mentors always told me to identify the main trouble instigators in a class and then nip it in the bud, but as I looked at this class, almost half of them were instigators and major trouble makers. So, I decided to focus on the positive instead. As the class filed in I gave the well-behaved, good, kind students these little invites that I had made on my computer. Once class began, I told the class that it was time for change. I told all the students who had received invites to remain in their seats. Those who didn't receive invites were to follow me. Attached to my classroom was a large, storage room with a door with a window. I took the 15-20 (let's not get caught up in numbers here) naughty students into the backroom and told them that I was done wrestling with them to teach them. They were now free to do whatever they wanted. I told them the assignment for the day if they wanted to do it but I wasn't going to try to force them to do anything anymore. They could just sit and waste time for all I cared. I told them the only rules were that they couldn't touch anything in the backroom that wasn't theirs and that they had to remain in the backroom. In my vision, I thought they would just sit there and talk or text friends on their cell-phones or just goof off (all the things they chose to do in my classroom every day). I then returned to my other students and began my lesson for the day. I thanked the well-behaved students for their patience and for being good and apologized that they often didn't get enough attention because their counterparts were often hogging my time and patience. The lesson was going wonderfully...it was everything I had envisioned teaching to be. We discussed important topics, students raised their hands to talk, we laughed, we got the assignment done quickly and efficiently...learning was finally happening in 7th period Language Arts! However, in the backroom trouble was a-brewin'. Have you ever read the novel Lord of the Flies? If not, you should. It is an interesting, and factual as it turns out, look at what happens to children when left to their own devices. I happened to glance over at the backroom at one point and some of the students were licking, yes licking, the window. And then I could see that they were jumping all around like monkeys. And then it appeared that they were slamming into each other and fighting. Wild kingdom had taken over in my backroom. At one point, the door opened slightly and a hand snaked out, grabbing a near-by back-pack of one of the good students, Holly. Holly insisted despite my warnings that she needed to get her back-pack back. I, myself, was hesitant to even go near the backroom. Suddenly I envisioned that hand snaking out and dragging me into the backroom by my ankle. And who knew what would happen then? My survival instincts were kicking in. But Holly was brave, if not a little foolish, and entered into the backroom. Have you ever seen the movie Independence Day with Will Smith? There's this scene where these doctors are enclosed in glass, operating on what they believe to be a sedated or dead alien. All of a sudden it comes to life, killing everyone, and then the alien presses one of the doctors against the glass and uses his vocal cords to communicate to the humans outside the glass, asking them to help him and let him out. Well, that was the scene before me. Holly's face was pressed against the glass and she was mouthing "help me! help me!" Some of the students in the classroom felt that we should do something to help her. But I told them that while I liked Holly and while she was a good person, I wasn't going to risk anyone else going in there. We just had to hope for the best. Meanwhile, Holly ended up full on tackling her best friend who was in there, BITING a boy on the shoulder who was blocking the door, and escaping.
Needless to say, the bell didn't ring soon enough for me. And by the next day there were all these rumors circulating that I had locked the kids in a closet and that I had bitten one of them and that I was being sued by all of them and that I was looking for a new job. Luckily, my principal was understanding and the parents ended up backing me up all the way with what I had done. But it certainly took a lot of explaining. Lesson learned: Never, ever, put an idea into action that you have in the middle of the night when you're trying to fall asleep no matter how good the idea may seem at the time!
