The Wake Up Call

There are aspects of teaching that I need work on. Classroom awareness, differentiation of instruction, management of classroom time are just a few. There are some aspects that I believe I do considerably well compared to even the most experienced teachers. Critical thinking, Socratic questioning and guided discovery lessons are the big ones.

But this past we was a wake up call that deeply wounded my teaching self efficacy. What do you do when the students don't take you seriously? Obviously the answer is to establish your authority at the beginning and be consistent. The problem arises in both my situation and when you didn't effectively do that at the beginning. So now you are left with a classroom full of students that don't have any respect for your authority or your teaching.

As I said in a previously post, my coop was out all week and I was left to teach all 5 classes all week. I went into this week with a positive outlook due to probably my most successful lesson to date last Friday. That quickly changed on Tuesday when I found out that the students in every single class seemed to believe that because their "real" teacher wasn't there they had free reign over the classroom. The bad part about it was that they were right. I was completely unprepared for these challenges and was never able to get a footing. I couldn't keep their attention for more than a few minutes at a time. There were some students that were completely uncontrollable.

Let me be clear that nothing crazy happened. The classroom wasn't nearly as bad as some of the classrooms I have observed but a significant amount of time was dedicated to something other than instruction. When I tried different types of intervention the most effective yielded only temporary moments where I held the classes attention. I think what my coop said when I called him really makes sense. I was telling him about my difficulties and he said that my hammer was him. Without him around, I was left with very little to control the classes. I am not familiar with disciplinary procedures nor to I think I could use them effectively. I don't have the reputation or the "look" that some effective teachers seem to possess. The reputation that I have is that I am new or green which in many cases can be identified as a push over or easily manipulated. I have no plan for handling this until I can have my own classroom with my own rules that I can enforce from the beginning.

Here is an example:
Everyday day this student would stand in the doorway and look at or interact with people in the hallway. This would be before the bell would ring and would continue after the class has begun. Usually, I am inundated with questions or permission slips for the first few minutes. My coop says that I need to get more assertive at the beginning of the period and get people in their seats. So this student would stand in the doorway, doing whatever he was doing and would not respond to my demands that he take his seat. He never tried anything like that while my coop was here but this student seems to notice that he was able to act differently with me and he was absolutely right. Now, I could have threatened him with something like a loss of points of a write up. In both of those cases I have absolutely no clue. My coop has ultimate control over the grades and I am working within his point system and I think the discipline process is not only futile but ultimately counter productive with most students.

I don't know. Maybe I could have or should have tried a more authoritative approach but he truth is that I am uncomfortable with that system. It's complicated and rife with paperwork and process. I made many mistakes this week and set myself back in all of the classes. For the first time, I feel anxious about what I have identified as my calling. I have seen so much success and have learned and developed so much that this week was that much harder. I have an intense feeling of emptiness where there was once passion and enthusiasm. I believe it is temporary but it makes me wonder if teaching can be what I want it to be or if I am just living in a dreamworld.