Sometimes, you just can't win.

Today started off fine. My second hour class, who had been part of the problem of the previous day, actually did their work. My LD/ADHD students did their work, other students kept doing what they had been doing, and the world was a beautiful place.

Of course, by the end of the hour the student who had her mom called the previous day decided to throw a fit and get all pissy about whether you have to do multiplication or division first in math (hint: you do them in order from left to right, unless you are a pigheaded 12-year-old). By the end of the hour, however, we were able to at least get her to finish her worksheet.

Third hour is where the escalation started. I shouldn't have done it, but I wanted to start the day off right. I talked to one of the three students who had had trouble the previous day, told him I wanted him to have a good day today, that tomorrow was past, etc. I then went to talk to the girl I made cry and her quite boisterous table-mate. I told her table-mate that I wanted to have a good day today, that I know she was rude yesterday....and that's where I lost her.

I made a rookie mistake by referring to the previous day's crapitude. I should have just let it go, I should have said that today was going to be a great day, and left it at that. But no, like a jackass of epic proportions, I decided to call attention to the fact that she was an insolent little cur yesterday (perhaps "prickly little pineapple" would have been a been a better use of nomenclature). She then went into a crazy rant about how she was going to apologize (she really wasn't) and act like an adult today (ditto), but I should have just let it go. Instead, I kept pushing until I couldn't push any further. The boundaries broke, and I lost her. I had to spend the rest of the hour attempting to keep her quiet.

It didn't help that the principal scheduled a tornado drill at 10:15, which is 20 minutes into class, and that lunch is at 10:40, so we had a completely disjointed class period. Between the drill and refocusing on our work following it, we didn't get much done before lunch.

After lunch, my insolent little cur didn't return. Other students told me that she had been taken out of lunch and was in the office. I wasn't entirely sure whether it was because of behavior or because of counseling matters (after this student's mother had a stroke, she had apparently taken her out of school for a full year so that the student could take care of her). Either way, the prickly little pineapple made it back to class with about fifteen minutes to spare. I told her I was glad to see her (in a weak attempt to build up a rapport that had been thoroughly trashed with the whole "rude" debacle from earlier). She said she was doing fine, and I told her that we had started to work on order of operations, and that she could copy down the notes in her notebook. She seemed amenable to this, then asked me if she could ask me a question. I said sure.

"Which food do you like more, tacos or sausages?"

Given that I have been 13 years old before, and given that I still watch the same type of movies 13 year olds watch, I was fully aware of the innuendo.

"That's inappropriate. Please sit down."

"What!? What's your problem? I'm not being inappropriate!"

"Just sit down. It's inappropriate. Get to work."

"You're the one who's inappropriate!"

And then the gates of hell decided to open, and demons decided to fly on brimstone wings, and students decided to talk loudly for no damn reason. While it hadn't been a great class period so far, it also hadn't been that bad. Even with the tornado drill, we were still able to do a bit of work, and the students seemed to understand Order of Operations.

What's funny about being a 13 year old is that you assume that everyone else is naive, when it is you, in fact, who is naive. My mom once told me a story about how she told her parents--whom she had never heard utter a swear word in her entire life--that "her generation" had a new word for sexual intercourse. The word started with an F and ended with what I assume should have been a mouth being washed out with soap.

Of course, I'm no better, since at the age of 12 I assumed that golf had been invented about 5 or 6 years before I started playing it, since I had never heard of it before then.

There is bliss in not knowing how unbelievably little you know.

So, here goes this: Today was not a good day.

I've had a few bad days so far, but it's rare that I have a day so bad that I feel horrible about myself when I go home. Usually, the feeling bad about myself floats in my emotional soup for a few minutes, but it sublimes into the air with the rest of the barely perceptible emotions before I leave for the day. Not today.

Today we had to call parents, had to separate students, had to do pretty much everything you don't want to have to do in order to get the class under control. Though none of this actually happened during my lessons, it still stuck with me because I'm still a contributing member of the teaching team (motto: We educate young minds so you don't have to, you complete failure of a parent). Being a part of a teaching team means that I'm not really "responsible" for what occurs when I'm not at the front of the class teaching, but it effectively means that I'm "hugely, positively, definitely responsible" for making sure the students are behaving when the other teacher is teaching.

This hasn't really presented a problem until today. Today was a bad day, as I have previously stated, but it was a bad day in many, many ways.

We were learning about Scientific Notation today, i.e. changing large numbers with lots of digits into fewer-digit numbers multiplied by a power of ten (292,000,000 = 2.92 x 10^8). This isn't a difficult lesson, especially considering that we worked on square roots yesterday and they understood that about as well as your average Papua New Guinean understands the electoral college. Today was supposed to be a break for everyone, since the lessons should have been easy and both the students and we would be able to work through it quickly.

First hour, the hour I taught, went that way. We got through the lesson (barely...need better time management skillz), and I thought everything was working well.

Second hour started auspiciously. All of the students were able to do the warm-up problems, even the ones who are perpetually having trouble. One wonderful little wallaby, a girl with learning disabilities who usually quits after the problems get too difficult, was able to push through and finish the warm-up as well as pay attention during instruction. Two other students, however, decided that they didn't want to learn that day. These prickly little pineapples kept their heads on their desks, no matter how many times we tried to adjust their attitude. One of them understood the lesson, which made it difficult to discipline her, but the other had absolutely no clue how to change a problem to/from scientific notation.

The student who understood kept putting her head down on her desk and looking askance at the board in order to technically be "looking at the board" but in reality just sitting with her head on her desk. The student who didn't understand wouldn't even make the effort to work on problems. This was a quandary.

When a student is insolent, the teacher has a few choices. One choice is to just let it go, to allow the student to get her way, and to keep pushing the class (other than her) forward. This option is probably the worst, since it allows the student to dictate the attitude of the class and the acceptable level of defiance. Another option is to hound the student until he/she gives in to your will as teacher. This method can get boring for both the student and the teacher, since both of them are fighting so hard to actually get their way that they are completely tired of the game by the end. The last option, at least in this discussion of various options, is the teacher immediately and completely bending the will of the student to her own. This requires the teacher to be in absolute control in the classroom and for the classroom to have norms established that make students feel uncomfortable if they don't conform. It's funny, I'm a huge fan of individuality, but I realize the need for conformity when it comes to behavioral norms in the classroom. There's just no conceivable way to keep control if all of the students are enforcing their own ideas about normative behavior upon the classroom.

Well, the teacher in charge of the class attempted to do option 3 on our prickly pineapple. That...did not go well. The student whined, complained, got angry, got more insolent, and finally got a trip out to the hall for all her trouble. While in the hall, she got the wonderful opportunity to talk to her mom at work, which I'm sure is what every student wants. And every mom, for that matter: it must be fun to get a call during your work day telling you how completely unmanageable your child is. Fun, fun stuff.

Since this post is getting long, I'll attempt to distill what happened in the final class period into a short paragraph or two.

Two girls in the back refused to listen. They didn't pay attention, then got mad at me because we made it a requirement that they finish the problems on the board in order for them to leave the classroom for the day. I told them that if they had listened, they'd have no trouble completing the problems (and, honestly, they wouldn't have. The problems took most students about 1 minute, if that).

After I took the time to explain how to do scientific notation to one of them, I attempted to explain it to the other one. She was having none of it. I told her she couldn't leave until we finished the problems, and I got her to finish one of the two sets. The bell rang, and she still hadn't completed the second set of problems. I told her that we'd work together to get it done, and that's when she started weeping.

I'm not heartless. Seeing a tiny, thirteen year old girl cry basically made me feel like an ogre of some variety (possibly one who lives under a bridge--yes, I know trolls usually live under bridges, but my capacity for imagination was a little skewed: there was a vulnerable child crying, and I was the presumptive cause). This girl, as I'd learned earlier in the summer, has ADHD, learning disabilities, and she no longer takes her meds. This girl is a mess, and I made her cry. I let her go without doing the problems. I have a feeling that will come back to bite me.

The big bad wolf is alive and well.

I was lucky enough to get the opportunity to observe a fellow newbie's classroom on Friday, and let me tell you: Everything I've written about my students now has to be re-examined. This poor teacher had just about the worst group of kids I'd ever seen, and that's saying a lot.

The thing about it was, the students were not blatantly bad. None of them cursed her out, none of them was defiant to the point of being cruel or mean, none of them really DID anything wrong. It was just an amazing accumulation of attitude and asshole-ery that undermined the entire classroom structure.

For example: A student was supposed to come up to the front of the board in order to do a problem. Most of the students in the class have some sort of behavioral disorder, whether it's ADHD or FAS or anything in between, I really don't know. The second another student came up to the front of the class and got the teacher's attention, there was nothing she could do to control the rest of them. They were shouting across the room at one another--nothing rude, nothing mean, just yelling random statments across the room that had zero relevance to the problem on the board--and once they started to lose focus it was nearly impossible to get them back on track.

I talked to the teacher afterwards, and she knew what the problems were. Since most of the students had either a behavioral disorder or, in some cases, a learning disability, them getting kicked out of class really didn't have much effect on them. In addition, she has yet to refer a student down to the office, so they know that they can get away with murder--well, maybe not murder, but at least a kidnapping with request for ransom--without getting sent to the office.

We actually talked about what she should do within our big classroom group, and the technique was basically to be sure to send one of the students to the office the next time it happens in order to show them you mean business. This struck me as odd, however, because then you're basically premeditating a dismissal for a student, though you don't necessarily know which student the dismissal will fall upon. Someone else mentioned this in class, and the explanation we got seemed satisfactory:

You oughtn't to decide that a student is going to get kicked out of class, but you must leave yourself open to that possibility. When it gets to a point where the students are no longer learning, that's the point where someone needs to be sent out to send a message. Give a warning, such as "the next person to do X will get kicked out." But what if the person who does X is actually behaving better than other students, but mistakenly does X at the wrong time? Then you should take that student aside and talk to him/her while waiting for another student to do X, because another student, invariably, will do X, because students are dumb like that. When a worse stduent does X, you can send that student down to the office without feeling bad about sending a kid who wasn't acting THAT bad down to the office.

Lesson learned.