My Pendulum Swings

Hello everyone,

I know I seem like a pendulum. One email tells you to clamp down on bad behavior, the next tells you to love the kids.

Think that it's less a pendulum and more a balancing act. You're walking on a tightrope; when you swing too far one way, you need to catch yourself and swing back the other.

Part of the secret is to know when to do the swinging.

Here are a few principles to keep in mind:

You are in charge. You may be a nice person, but you are in charge.

You MUST take charge. If you don't take charge, then you are telling other people that they are in charge, not you.

This taking charge should have happened at the first day of your class. Some of you came into your classes late into the year; some of you didn't take charge at the beginning; some of you are still learning how to take charge. What this means is that the act of taking charge is going to be harder for you than it is for those who took charge in the first moments of the first day. It's not impossible, but it's difficult. (Resolve that next year you'll do better.)

Remember that good planning is essential to taking charge. If your days are bad, look to your planning first.

If you are currently in what feels like a battle for control of your class, and your students are telling you they hate you and you are mean, don't take it personally.

Sometimes in the heat of "battle," you will lose track of what it is you really want. What you really want is to deliver the highest quality, standards-based instruction to all your students. You may have loftier goals of helping your students become fine, upstanding members of this great democracy, and that's all right. You may incorporate the two goals and do well. But if your class is only a constant revisiting of the rules and enforcement of the rules, then you're not accomplishing anything.

As soon as possible, you must move away from the unemotional authority figure toward the warm, caring, nurturing teacher.

If, in the middle of November, you have classes that are not under control, you will likely remain in the unemotional authority figure mode for some time--months perhaps.

Even in the midst of being an unemotional authority figure, you must judiciously find good things that your students have done. Do not lavish praise, but do not withhold it either. You must remember to teach your students what it means to be under control so that they can move toward self control. That means that you must tell them when they have done it correctly. If they have a particularly difficult time doing things correctly, then you should point out when they have done part of what you suggest correctly. ("I asked you to sit down quietly and do your work; I appreciate that you have sat down; now, please be quiet and do your work. I appreciate that you have your materials out, now do your work, please." Etc.)

Above all, however, you must love them. Hate their behavior, by all means, but love them.

In this sense, I'm not swinging like a pendulum. I'm thinking that there are fixed ideas, and as you work with the kids, you must keep the ideas in mind.

Even when you are being the strictest you must be, even when you are firm about severe consequences for behavior, even when you are not giving in to the begging or the whining or the flirting that they will do to get you to give in and let them off free, you should still love them and respect them. Firmly separate the child from the child's behavior. Mercy for the child, justice for the behavior.

Jeff Combe