You'll get there

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Home : 2002 : January : 27

You'll get there
By Shannon

Jacey, all of these suggestions are good, so I won't offer any more of my own. However, I just wanted to tell you, as the last poster did, that many of us had horrible classroom management situations when we first started.
I went home crying the first day of school and most of the first two weeks because the discipline problems were so much worse than I expected. One problem is that after student teaching in a nice primary classroom in a suburban neighborhood, I thought I had no problems with classroom management. Suddenly I found myself teaching fifth graders in an urban district, and behavior turned

out to be a BIG problem. One problem was that, as with many things in life, you have to quickly get past the idea that what you expected to happen and what actually happens are drastically and disappointingly different. I had all kinds of great ideas I had gotten from various places, and I wanted to try them in my classroom, but all day long I dealt with behavior. It's hard because we're supposed to be meeting all these standards and boosting test scores, and we really want to have a creative and balanced curriculum, but you can't do any of this because you spend half the day disciplining.

Like others, I felt like I was doing everything right. I was firm and consistent, and I usually didn't fly off the handle. Well, anyway, I did change some things and made little innovations in what I did (like not attempting to have students popcorn read the health textbook when many of them can't read that well and are in post-lunch mania anyway), but I think what helped the most was the passage of time. Somehow I got more comfortable with changing what I could change and accepting what I couldn't change, and the kids got used to the work they were supposed to do and to the idea that they had to do it. Don't get me wrong, discipline problems still consume a lot of the day, but any teacher will tell you that. It's just that I became more comfortable with what would happen and what I could do. I suspect you will, too.