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| courtesy of Pixabay CC0 Public Domain |
All you teachers and former teachers out there will understand
what I mean when I say one student being present or absent can make an enormous
difference in the atmosphere and behavior of the overall class.
Incontrovertible proof of this came today with the return of a
student who was the only child absent from my home room yesterday. This young
lady is very rarely absent. Her absence yesterday was made obvious by the unusually
good behavior of the rest of the class.
With her back today, the level of disruption and incidence of me
having to get the class back on task, mostly those students sitting close to
her, was demonstrably greater than yesterday. It is not that this young lady is
deliberately disrupting, she just has a hard time understanding the need for
her to pay attention and be on task with what is going on in class, and that
she doesn’t need to comment on everything going on around her, or to talk to
her near classmates about anything and everything that pops into her head.
This young lady tends to get very frustrated when I point out to
her the manner in which she is disrupting instruction. Knowing her mother, and
knowing how this young lady speaks to her mother, I understand why she feels
that whatever she wants to say should trump anything else going on in class.
Her mother lets her get away with speaking that way at home, and even to her at
school in front of her teachers.
The young lady does have enough self-control not to let her
frustration turn into an argument most of the time. She does have a bad habit
of wanting to explain why she wasn’t doing what she was supposed to be doing.
She always has an excuse. That’s not unusual. Middle School students as a whole
are full of excuses for being off-task, out of place, or not having their
materials. What they have a hard time understanding is the teacher isn’t
usually interested in their excuses, the teacher only wants the inappropriate
behavior to stop.
This constant need to explain themselves, in other words – to give
cause to their improper actions, is a manifestation of the decreased level of
maturity compared to age these students suffer from as a result of growing up
with parents and other adults in their lives who try to reason with them about
things from a young age, an age well below the age of reason. This treatment of
the young doesn’t teach them how to work things out and make good decisions, it
teaches them that is permissible to argue unendingly about whether or not they
should do what they are told. Talking back becomes an ingrained habit because
the parents and other adults have taught the child it is okay.
When the child comes into the Middle School and brings this
attitude with them, as the young lady I’m writing about today has, it becomes a
problem in the classroom. Children with this attitude feel entitled to question
the teacher’s decisions about nearly everything, from asking them to be quiet
to assigning them a seat. Some students
learn early, and accept it as fact, that a teacher is not someone with whom
they can argue and bargain to get their way. Others, like today’s subject,
never learn the lesson. The balance from those students who get it to those who
don’t is swinging further towards those who don’t every year.
Every year I have to work harder to make these students
understand that they need to learn when and where it is appropriate to
challenge and whom. What is making it tougher each year is more and more of the
parents are siding with the students on this issue. But I will continue to try
and instill in my students, including this young lady, what is appropriate
behavior, and to try and help them understand how their oppositional,
argumentative behavior will not serve them well in school or, eventually, in
the workplace.
As always, I remain,
The Exhausted Educator
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