Practice Makes Perfect

Borrow your neighbor's kids.

Make a list of the rudest, most obnoxious children in your neighborhood. Ask their parents if they would like for you to take their children off their hands for an hour or two, and then watch the parents' faces light up!

Practice on small groups during your free time.

Does your school punish students by holding them in from recess? Does your school punish students by detaining them after-school? Does your school schedule honor society meetings during school hours, thereby excluding most of the worst-behaving students? When your school holds field trips, does that leave behind the students whose parents are too negligent to sign permission slips, who happen to be the worst-behaving students?

All of these situations may be unfortunate, but they all offer perfect opportunities for you to practice tomorrow's lessons today. Ask your own worst-behaving students--and better yet, also ask the other teachers' worst-behaving students--to do you a favor by allowing you to practice-teach on these students. Tell them to act as they usually act with all 28 children in the room. This will be difficult, because these few students are receiving more individual attention, so they will have less reason to misbehave.

But whether they misbehave in the practice setting or not, show lots of appreciation. When the lesson is over, thank those students for what they've done for you.

Betcha you will see a valuable by-product: the students' self-esteen will increase and their misbehavior will decrease. What's more, if you can do this for a student in the next room, then that will please the teacher in the next room.

Betcha you will see another valuable by-product: After behaving better than usual throughout the practice lesson, the misbehaving students in your class might get in the habit. Don't be surprised if they behave perfectly the next day.

Try these practice situations, or any other practice situations you can think of. This will give you plenty of time to rehearse most of the more common discipline problems with no immediate fear of the misbehaving students, the adjacent teachers, the parents, or the administrators. And as far as those insights which seemed so valuable when you were an education student, this will give you a chance to call up those insights and give them some sane and rational thought.

Then the next day, when you encounter those disciplinary problems

Go To Page: 1 2 3