Every day, I pray for wisdom to know when to jump on students and when to take them aside for a sympathetic chat.

Usually, some combination of the two strategies works well. But then, my students are high schoolers.  You can reason with them, show them their grades, call their parents.  My brief sojourn in the land of Junior High convinced me (perhaps wrongly) that I had to be all mean, all the time.  I feel that I can relax and be more my real self with high schoolers.

For instance, yesterday, a student was obstinate and refused to work.  I usually push him into working a little, but his mood was different.  I handled him more gently and just kept the rest of the class working.  Later, we discovered that he had been in a fight and was quite upset.  I was probably safer because I didn't push him to the edge of his temper by growing impatient with him. (He is one of my kids with an explosive temper.)

  The most challenging class situation is when an entire class becomes a runaway train.  In most of my classes, we interact a lot.  We talk and laugh, but stay on track.  Today, two boys began to make fun of me and laugh at me.  It was suddenly unexpectedly ugly. Two other girls joined in and began speaking in Spanish. For any teacher, the first rule is that we cannot afford to have our self-esteem on the line.  Such behavior must not hurt our feelings.  We must always have a plan.  So I put the whole class into pop quiz mode while I wrote referrals on the two culprits.  A hush descended on the room.  "Are you sending me to the office now?" one of the boys asked. 

"No," I explained, "I'm giving you a chance to straighten up and do the right thing.  I'm just writing the referrals in case you don't."  I kept one of the boys after class to talk to him about his frequent references to being a drug lord.  I told the other that I was deeply disappointed at seeing a side to him that I had never witnessed.

The rest of the time went fine.  Tomorrow, I plan a tightly organized class for them. Maybe I'll start with permanently assigned seating. Of course, thestudents all failed the test.  It was made up of material we were supposed to cover in class. They will have an opportunity to correct the mistakes as we go over the definitions aloud in class. It might be a good day to review the rules and the purpose of school.