It's Friday morning and kids come back on Monday. The class is basically ready. I need to put a set of textbooks with each lab table. I'm working on a PowerPoint to go with Tuesday's lesson - 6th and 7th grades are writing a position paper on what is the greatest scientific mystery. They get to choose between the Big Bang, life, and consciousness. (We quickly get into how faith and science do not relate.If you beleive in God, S/He gave you a brain, so use it!) 8th grade is picking a mystery of the brain from 10 that were featured in a recent issue of Discover magazine. At noon we are encouraged to set off on the 25 mile trek into san Pedro for the whole school beginning of year fiesta.
I remember 3 years ago when I was starting here I was apprehensive and nervous about going back into the classroom, and I hadn't ever left classroom teaching. The weekend before school was to start I was 'faffing' around the classroom trying to sort everything just so. Now I know the kids. The 6th graders will be new, but they are rumored to be a nice group. I suppose it has always been management that has been the concern and I have never had much of a management problem. When I worked at a public school in Immokalee, Florida, there would be large classes of low income kids (2 years the class size hit 50 for a couple of weeks before the Board approved splitting the class), but most mainstreamed 5th graders were manageable even if they weren't motivated to participate in academics.
My main strategy is peer pressure. Most of the day the kids spend in teams and earn points for various things they do. The only way they lose points is to break a classroom rule (see Blog #1 for my rules). One member of the team has the role to correct team members breaking rules and can save the team the lost points by self-correcting their team. Points can have many uses. The one I use now is buying a free recess. But I digress ...
Or maybe I don't. I've used this system for years and I don't really have management problems. Occasionally I have a kid who will not respond to peer pressure. I move them out of their team and if they are disruptive for attention I ignore them and take off points from their "individual" team of 1 person. If they don't respond to this, it is time for a parent conference and it escalates from there. Occasionally you find the kid who is disruptive for power. Most of these you can negotiate with and 9 times out of 10 they will be motivated to be the leader of a team and for their team to have the most points.
If I have had this figured out for a long time now, why have I always felt butterflies before school starts? Is it possibly an unconscious nervousness about the impact I am about to have on these kids and in some way the future of the world?
Occasionally when I read about governments holding schools and teachers accountable for the success of students (usually based on test scores), I reply with the fact that schools have kids on average 17% of their waking time. (You can do the math figuring average child is in school 7 hours a day 180 days a year and sleeps 8 hours a night.) Why are we held responsible when parents and society in general have responsibility for kids 83% of their waking time? But I definitely digess here ...
Maybe I am more relaxed because as the science teacher I have each student only 45 minutes a day 5 days a week. That is a little less than 2% of their waking time. I can't do too much damage to the world in that time and maybe I'll trigger a spark of inspiration and along the way make learning fun for a little while.
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