They came in yesterday grumbling of sleep lost, of buses nearly missed. I told ’em I loved the spring forward ’cause it meant I only had to wait 47 hours to see ’em again.

I do this after three-day weekends. I’ll curse the births of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. I’ll tell ’em how much I worry about ’em over winter break.

It’s weird how it started out all silvertongued, kind of an inside joke between us with flattery/sincerity balanced somewhere around 90/10, but then, at one point, the balance swapped. And I meant it.

TMAO comments on Joanne Jacobs’ reblog of Scott’s Teachers Gone Wild series.

Exhumed for y’all:

Good teachers don’t have these problems. They don’t. Good teachers would never let classroom culture degenerate to this point, and if it did, they would not resort to screaming, throwing fits, and cursing. Please. These are not accurate cross-sections of anything except the various ways bad teachers make bad situations worse.

I’ll bet all the money in my pockets that you can see these same kids at different points of the day acting in dramatically different ways. Why? Because student behavior is a function of educator quality.

Did you watch the first video all the way to the end? Did you hear what the girl in the front row said? “Sir, we’ve been sitting hear for 1/2 an hour and you aren’t saying anything. You’re just standing there staring at us. Obviously, we’re going to get bored and talk.”

She’s right. Teach the kids. Be good at your job. Act like a human adult and not some petulant robot child, and watch all these little petty problems disappear.

Then this dude Michael’s all up in TMAO’s Kool-Aid like:

But if you believe no teenagers come to class without fear and primarily intent on showing off by thwarting the teacher’s will, I think you are naive.

Dayum! But then TMAO comes back with:

Fine. So what? A good teacher can 1) handle it in ways that don’t fall back upon the silly and ultimately ineffective use of fear, 2) create in their rooms conditions that are more interesting and appealing than showing off. If you don’t believe that, please change professions. And I gotta tell ya, there’s nothing soft about sending kids the message that you’re gonna bust your ass every minute you’re in my classroom; you’re gonna worker stronger and harder than ever before; you’re gonna transform your hollow dislike of these processes into pride and joy. There’s nothing soft about establishing ambitious, aggressive goals, and employing the will to get kids there.

TMAOed!

The most fun I had the other night was lurking in the comments over at Scott’s placeSlow night., where he posted seven cellphone films of teachers gone wild, and asked if that kind of video qualified as student journalism or punishable infraction.

The comments came out in force, in volume, and few so far have gone anywhere near Scott’s prompt, most rephrasing his question as, “What do you think about these damn kids today?”

To which a bunch of YouTube-era pseudonyms (like, I swear, “MrStench”) reply somewhere in the neighborhood of:

We are too easy on children in our schools. If they don’t want to be in a regular class and learn, put them in a remedial class with a drill instructor as the teacher. The kids can self-study from their textbooks and take the tests without the advantages of good teaching.

and bonus nonsense from “Glen” (ha … imaginative pseudonym, pal!):

Most kids nowadays are punks. For them, school is a place to hang with friends and sell drugs… not to learn.

But what’s positively cool about this fracas is that, at the same time I’m mourning a world that grants these ageists and racists teaching credentials, that lets them run free and unjailed, a bunch of folks I routinely disagree with on matters of tech suddenly dash into the fray issuing replies and rebuttals all seasoned with grace and reason.

Nice job, people. I’m talking about Dana Huff, Taylor, Dave Sherman, and Dean Shareski, quoted:

Do our best teachers have this problem? I doubt it. So let’s work on developing great teachers and learning environments instead of band aid solutions that involve avoiding litigation and public embarrassment. Will students still act up and egg teachers on to go into rants? Certainly, but they’d be minimal with great teachers and great teachers would be less prone to react as some of these have done.

It’s cool to realize that, in spite of our frequent lower-case differences, we feel a comparable burden for our students’ engagement and recognize that their behavior is often a mirror of our own.

Group hug. C’mere.

Seriously I hope this unseasonably warm weather catches cancer of the elbow and dies. Not even my most interesting stuff can compete on these terms.

It would not disappoint me in the least if our seven-day forecast looked like this:

So, I’m elevating my second period to yellow alert. I realize there are only three or four student leaders taking the class towards this state of outright laziness and flagrant disrespect but the rest of the class is led along far too willingly.

So what do you do here? Maybe you keep ’em after the bell. Maybe you call home. Maybe you punish ’em with a quiz when they’re out of linePlease please please don’t do this..

Well here’s my playbook and not even a student peeking in will circumvent it, such is its power.

Step One

Dismantle the miscellaneous fun, piece by piece.

Step Two

Just wait.

What I’m Not Saying

I’m not saying that I’ll give them substandard material, that I’ll give my other classes the interesting cup-stacking activity and punish these kids with lousy learning.

What I’m saying is that, daily, throughout the year, I’ve put money into an insurance policy.

The policy has cost me:

1. A greeting at the door for each student. 0 MinutesSince class time hasn’t yet commenced..
2. A fun question on the opener. 2 Minutes. Today’s was, “What is the average toll to pass through the Panama Canal?” Something just a little interesting, slightly strange, and off-topic enough to matter.
3. An interesting photoset from the “intertubesIntentional butchering of “internet” optional, but guaranteed mocking laughter..” 1 minute. Some kitty wigs just, uh, for one example.
4. An interesting video from the internets. 3 minutes. Something provocative and fun. Like Amy Walker’s 21 Accents in 2.5 Minutes.

We’re talking 6 minutes per day, 15 minutes over a 300-minute week. Ain’t nothin’, especially balanced against a) the discussions we’ve had over some of this miscellany, b) how much better we relate to each other once they get that I’m not exclusively about the math, and c) most relevantly here, the insurance policy I have for classroom management emergencies.

So I’ll just yank ’em out one-by-oneUm, this policy assumes you have something positive in your class to yank out. Which you should..

They’ll ask why and – careful here – I won’t rub the reason in their faces. I won’t wag my finger, cluck my tongue, or pack ’em on a guilt trip.

I’ll claim with an earnest grimace that we just don’t have time for the fun anymore given how much time I spend pressing them into work which their peers from my other classes commit to willingly.

I mean, I’ll really sell my own regret. It’s legitimate. Sorry, guys. We just can’t do it.

This insurance policy lifts the burden of guilt off the student and puts it 100% on the behavior. Students hate the suggestion (however deserved) that they need to change themselves but they’ll willingly change their behavior to get what they want.

So gimme a weekPS. This lesson in classroom management brought to you by Skinner, who is Chris’ BFF..

Update:

Or six minutes.

Having stood outside every day the last seven months, rain, shine, or whatever, sayin’ hello, when I wasn’t out there yesterday, kids knew I was serious.

Not sayin’ it was all perfect after that. But all it’s gonna take is, like, two more days of this kind of sobriety. Then we have a good day and I’ll release a little bit of the good.

It’s predictable.

Okay, so what I’m trying to say is that the textual study of classroom management failed me in ed school. Even grails like The First Days Of School, Every Minute Counts, etc., didn’t do me anywhere near as good as butchering a period and slumping back for an autopsy with my mentor.

I can’t offer every new teacher that experience but I think I can offer them something close, something, I’m almost certain, better than the usual detached ed-school take on classroom management.

I want to insert teachers into a sequence of carefully engineered classroom management disasters – which we’ll call … um … “episodes” for right now – each one focusing on a distinct, typical conflict, each one increasing in complexity, and each one so virtual you can just walk away from the disaster with a pocketful of answers at the end.

In other words, I want you to own your management solutions rather than buy mine. My book of maxims is easily dismissed and finitely applicable to your classroom. But if I put you and your new teacher buddies into a virtual classroom management thicket (ideally alongside a mentor) and say, “hack your way out of it,” each of you will construct your own solutions, each of which will look slightly different from the others.

Moreover, as with any line of inquiry that begins, “What went wrong here?” you’ll find solutions to problems I included unwittingly, which is awesome. Moreover, you can insert yourself into the same situation a year later and watch your entire solution set change. Are these outcomes even possible with a book of prescriptive advice?

Obviously I’m talking about televisionWhoops – lost half of you right there but past that I’m still working things out.