So today's post will be fairly short because I am exhausted. Both mentally and physically, I am having difficulty keeping up with my own plans for the day. I think it's still going to take some time for me to get into the swing of the school experience, but I'm doing my best.
Today I really spent some time thinking about distracted students and also distracting students. Particularly in the freshman class, I have a lot of students who are simply very distracting. They whistle, they make noises, they hit pens onto things, they shift in their seats and one student actually keeps picking his entire desk up and moving it around.
Today the students answered the prompt "What is your ideal classroom environment?" Over half of them (13 out of 24) said it should be quiet, and many made mention of the other students being distracting. So what as a teacher am I to do? On the one hand, I want everyone to be able to participate and get the most from the class that they can. If someone is showing that they will hinder another student, that can't fly. Yet if I try purposefully to stop it, then it may only make the distraction worse or take more time away from the students who are set on learning.
Obviously I don't have any easy answers here. Just something I'm pondering. One idea I do like is trying to give distracting students positions of authority in the classroom. Perhaps make them in charge of collecting homework assignments or seeing that the class guidelines are followed. Something that gives them a way to 'buy in' to the classroom structure and give them a sense of investiture. I haven't tried it yet, but I think by helping these students to feel that they are a part, indeed an integral part, of the classroom, they will be more inclined to participate and less inclined to distract.
My current plan is to speak to the students to-morrow about what they wrote on the ideal classroom. I hope that if everyone sees how many students want quiet to help them focus, it might provide a social pressure to the distracting students and also help those students who want it to be quiet not feel as if they're alone.
It's just a place to start for now, but I think it's a solid one. To-morrow will mark the first time I'm up in front of the class wearing the teacher hat and doing the teacher thing. Let's see how it goes.
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A thought, again coming from the position of having subbed and not someone who's been taught the right or most affective way of dealing with these kinds of things...but what is the school's discipline policy? One thing that actually sort of worked at People's academy (depending on how well the teacher actually followed through) is that many of the teachers had done just this kind of survey, and from there compiled a list of class expectations, with clear consequences for not meeting them. I mean, I realize it's tricky balancing being a bastard and being a friendly and imnspiring teacher, but in my experience the best high school teachers I had did just that--if the kids know you're serious about certain lines, they won't cross em. And once those boundaries are established, things can go a little smoother...
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