I am pretty sure that students will not learn if they are wandering around in the hallway. To this point, I am not sure why students are allowed to simply stay in the hallway. As a teacher in the 7th and 8th grade wing, I had a 5th grade student today just sitting there. So many times this same student is in the hallway because "he's with the security guard." Well that's all fine and dandy, but first of all, it's definitely not HIS job to babysit, and second of all, GO TO CLASS! LEARN SOMETHING!
In my experience, which is all that I can speak to, students are allowed to carry on with behaviors that cause them to not learn. Wandering the hallway is a big one. 98% of the time when I see students in the hallway, I give them a 'what for' and tell them to get moving to class. The other 2% of the time, I'm so worn out that I cannot stand to deal with it. Mind you, this is not in my job description. It is not my job to clear the halls on my prep period. My job is to 'prep' on my prep period. It is this behavior, along with many others, that, when left un-touched by a disciplinary action, continues to perpetuate the sad excuse for a learning environment that I often teach in. Children wandering the halls, screaming between (or during) periods, jumping on others' backs, being EXTREMELY disrespectful, play fighting (or real fighting) in the hallways - it is these behaviors that we apparently don't care about which creates an atmosphere of chaos in. Oh, and we expect to improve test scores in this jungle...
We need to start small - 'Sweat the Small Stuff' as Achievement First would say. If we began the year with small things, discipline for small actions, not worrying about how long it takes in the beginning of the year - as long as we get it right - then at this point of the year, students would not be so crazy. I would not dread coming in to work most days. I would not work and teach in a jungle. Students might actually learn.
I am only one person. I can only do so much.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Emily Shumway, is this your blog? I did not know you had one. There is an excellent book I would recommend to you called Dumbing Us Down by John Gatto. He was a NY Public school teacher for 30 years and has some wonderful insights on education. I believe you would love his books. I have read a few of them and I strongly agree with his views. You know me... I am a romantic when it comes to education. I may have TOO much of a positive attitude toward children and their learning, but it can hurt! I am in love with children and every time I look at them I see a genius, but I know some of them have not figured they are intelligent yet. When a student does not respond as I expected I think... I must have done something wrong! You are probably thinking “she teaches very young and wealthy children, that is why!” But mind you I was a middle and upper school teacher in public schools in Brazil...
ReplyDeleteI will quote parts of the book to you and I hope you will give it a thought.
Like so many university students, Gatto was taught by his professors that intelligence and talent were distributed throughout the population in bell curve predictability. But his experience as a teacher taught him differently. He writes:
The trouble was that the unlikeliest kids kept demonstrating to me at random moments so many of the hallmarks of human excellence—insight, wisdom, justice, resourcefulness, courage, originality—that I became confused. They didn’t do this often enough to make my teaching easy, but they did it often enough that I began to wonder, reluctantly, whether it was possible that being in school itself, was what was dumbing them down. Was it possible I had been hired not to enlarge children’s power, but to diminish it? That seemed crazy on the face of it, but slowly I began to realize that the bells and confinement, the crazy sequences, the age-segregation, the lack of privacy, the constant surveillance, and all the rest of the national curriculum of schooling were designed exactly as if someone had set out to prevent children from learning how to think, and act, to coax them into addiction and dependent behavior.
These insights led Gatto to develop a teaching style completely opposite to the methodology taught in the university. He writes:
Bit by bit I began to devise guerilla exercises to allow the kids I taught—as many as I was able—the raw material people have always used to educate themselves: privacy, choice, freedom from surveillance, and as broad a range of situations and human associations as my limited power and resources could manage….I dropped the idea that I was an expert, whose job it was to fill the little heads with my expertise, and began to explore how I could remove those obstacles that prevented the inherent genius of children from gathering itself.
I wish you and those children all the best. Never stop loving them and please nurture their little spirits.
Lorena Seidel