Do you know the jingle? “When she is good, she’s very, very good, but when she is bad she is horrid.”
In my 4th grade class I have a child who is like that, so little self-control. Now that it is the middle of the school year, her outbursts are close to habitual and I’m running out of strategies to modify her behavior. By now she is often “sent to the office” for a “time out.”
When reading through articles, I get answers like ‘teachers must be able to remove disruptive students immediately’ suggesting that charter schools and parochial schools are better because they have that policy. Perhaps those schools are quieter, but I can think of a number of reasons why all is silent, not necessarily kind and helpful reasons, and not simply because they get rid of disruptive students.
Of course, all teachers want their students to be quiet, studious, busy in productive activity-that’s what I learned in my credentialing classes. After all, this is an intense phase of the school year when state tests are coming up in a month and students must have mastered all the subjects to be tested on California’s current criterion-referenced assessment tool.
At the same time, this is a school year of instability. Though the Education Foundation is trying to cobble together funds, our school district deficit is large which means 102 teachers, including me, face lay offs. In addition, guidelines for accountability are going to change due to new California legislation, and articles advocate a variety of evaluation mechanisms to lift up the highly qualified teachers and weed out the poorly qualified, all of which will take money, lots of money. How will that happen? The state is facing a budget deficit of $20 million for 2010-2011.
Do you see what I mean? The ground is shaking under us and it’s hard to think of one more way to get this child to have a successful year.
Never give up. We hold daily morning class meetings to review the business of the school day, remind ourselves how to act to help the class get through a successful day, talk over problems that might come up, defining over and over what happens if you choose to act out.