Amy’s HS Block Blog

My cooperating teacher has been sick the past couple of weeks. He was present Monday, though, so I went to his class. We had three students at first (normal head count is at least five). A few minutes after the bell, another student knocked on the door. The teacher advised me to check his pass before allowing him to enter. I checked it, it was legitimate, so he came inside. However, I failed to notice his earbuds. The teacher spotted them right away, though, and immediately told the student that he needed to walk back to the doorway, put the headphones away, and then he could join the class. The student wasn’t having it — and the teacher wasn’t having his “okay, whatever” response. Teacher kicked student out. Student proclaimed he didn’t need this class anyway. Teacher scribbled off a discipline form of some kind and had me walk it to the office. Apparently while I was gone, an assistant principal returned with the student, saying the music had been put away and asking if the student would be allowed to return to class. The teacher said no, he will not learn correct behavior if he never experiences the consequences. He added while he was telling me this that especially with students with cognitive issues, consequences need to be swift so that the student will connect his behavior with that immediate consequence, so that he can learn from the experience.

This whole scenario felt a little jarring to me. Normally my cooperating teacher is quite easygoing and flexible. But I think I understand why he acted the way he did. a) He’s sick. He feels awful. As he put it: “I don’t need this today.” b) This student chronically misbehaves, when he bothers coming to class at all. We catch him pretty frequently sticking an earbud in one ear when he thinks we aren’t looking, playing with his phone and sending text messages, and not doing his work even when he doesn’t seem to be attending to any other tasks. Plus, c) I think the teacher felt a bit disrespected, both by the student’s behavior in the past and the blatant walking-into-class-with-earbuds-on that directly caused his dismissal from class.

I think I learned a lesson about assertiveness here. In many cases, we as teachers need to be assertive or our students aren’t going to learn, and that may be applicable to more than classroom management alone…