I assign one third of my six-teacher team’s discipline consequences, and recently asked my most veteran colleague how she gets away with doling out so few.
Two things, she said. First, every night at seven o’clock she starts calling parents; she can sometimes call twenty in an hour. “But it’s hard to do that when you have young children,” she said. Second, she changes activities every seven minutes.
I’ve decided to neglect both strategies, as my evening priorities are not school related and meaningfully creative writing and reading, unlike social studies, cannot take place in seven-minute increments.
More often–this week, anyway–my ninety-minute class periods look like this: read for twenty minutes, work on group projects for half an hour, and then work on the essay assignment for another half hour. (The other ten minutes–as well as some of each segment’s time–get swallowed up by transitions.)
It’s pretty hard core, I’d say, in comparison to short-and-sweet activities–and I’ve seen it work beautifully. Often kids who struggle with focusing take a long time to center themselves, but when they get focused, they can have some staying power.
When that has happened and I announce that it’s time to pack up for dismissal, I love hearing “Already?”
I took a sick day Wednesday and requested and got my first-choice sub, an extremely nit-picky, no-nonsense, better-cross-your-t’s retired teacher, the kind of person no student likes but I trust to maintain order.
Overall the day went great, and she left negative feedback about just four students. One was a girl, BK, who unsurprisingly had piped up during quiet work time to ask a disruptive question: “Do penguins fart?” (Or was it pigeons?)
On Thursday, BK told me, “I asked Mrs. S if penguins fart, and she got mad.”
I ignored her.
On Friday, BK asked me, “Do penguins fart?”
And I ignored her.
I just woke up from lovely dream in which I was setting up a new classroom I’d inherited from another teacher, complete with pews, tables, bookshelves, comfy chairs, you name it. I organized it to be homey and fun yet focused, and I was excited when my … high school students started to come to class.