The two classes last week with the jovenes had been abominable. Both times, they endured that grueling testing I wrote about, and then gathered in my class for instruction about an entirely new unit. From the first class to the second, they got progressively more out of control. My mind was spinning. I completely understood and sympathized with their plight. I didn’t blame them for being wild. I just muddled through as best I could, knowing that their minds were fully saturated — yet knowing that the time schedule was driving me onto the next unit.

In preparing for yesterday, I spent at least ten hours trying to figure out interactive ways to bring the material into their grasp. Their language skills are so low that everything requires a lot of “pre” work: extinct, endangered, Pyrenean ibex, Indonesia, overhunted… I walked a mile to a street vendor and bought some small dinosaurs. I found and printed some beautiful color scenes with dinosaurs. With a template that Genevieve had sent me, I built a PowerPoint version of Jeopardy with related questions. I had physical activity, visuals, audio, reading, tactile experiences, role playing, all carefully mapped out so that the “enriched” versions interwove sequentially with the textbook material.

From the moment I came into the room it was utter chaos. There are only five kids but I can’t control them. Even the two well-behaved ones are part of the disruptive action. It got progressively worse as the class proceeded. Sharon stood up and walked around and talked loudly to no one in particular throughout the class. Lupita kept knocking on her desk to try to get me to think someone was at the door. Then she and Sharon kept leaping up when my back was turned and taking things from my desk (my “desk” meaning a 12″ x 18″ table and the seat of a chair). During a blackboard activity during which each was to draw an element of a habitat to illustrate that key vocabulary word in the text, they got in fights and kept erasing each other’s drawings, and it was all I could do to get the pens back from them and get them to sit down. Luz was an active part of the aforementioned trouble. Ricardo and Raquel, normally fairly attentive, were drawn into the hysteria.

I realize I’m using a pedagogically incorrect word: control. I’m not worried at the moment about what the ideal teacher would say. I’m just going to express myself. I’m frustrated and even hurt. I never wanted to teach children, for exactly this reason.

I tried everything I could think of: changing an activity that seemed to be bombing, stopping and staring until people got silent out of curiosity, rearranging seating, randomizing who was to respond when, semi-playfully rearranging their bodies to new places during a role play when they were out of control. I looked at my watch. There was an hour to go.

By that time my lesson plan was in shreds, as were my spirits. When more children got into the action of touching my stuff, I got firm. In Spanish, I told them: Do not touch my things. This is my area. Do no touch. [That’s about all I could handle in Spanish, and one small part of the discipline issue is the language barrier, since they never would have understood the English version, even if they’d been listening.]

Ten minutes before class ended I wrapped up the classroom material and brought out the homework. Well, that was possibly the worst chaos of all. Sharon and Lupita stood up and loudly repeated, “No homework. No tarea.” Lupita packed up her bags and started to walk out of the room. Then she made a face by sticking out her tongue, at the prospect of homework.

I stopped. I said, “In Mexico, is that a rude thing to do?” (and, yes, I recasted it several ways for comprehension). Where I live, that is very rude. No es amable.” One kid understood what I was saying and agreed that it was rude. But my Spanish skills aren’t good enough to talk more about it. I felt devastated. I was angry. I tried to hide it but it always shows with me. Three of the kids fled before I could give them my customary handshake goodbye: my way to show mutual respect and closure.

Little Luz lingered longer than the others at the end of the class, as she always does, as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened. She gave me another drawing that she’d made for her homework. She does wonderful drawing. But she was expecting a warm greeting, but instead I asked her, “No le gusta esta clase?” She seemed baffled. “Si, me gusta.” And she started to leave. I felt bad and reached to shake her hand as usual.

Suddenly, “Teacher” has taken on a new meaning.” It is not a sign of respect, but someone one must endure.

Intentionally, I never established classroom rules, because of our language barrier. And I wasn’t too worried about it because the kids were respectful if squirmy.

Now I’m rethinking everything — the ferocious timeline be damned. I cannot endure another class like that. How do I reassert “control” and regain their interest. I’d always thought that interest bred control. I acknowledge that there something(s) I’m doing that aren’t working for the kids, though I’ve tried all the variations I can think of. I’ve tried to make the subject matter interactive, interesting and engaging, but have failed. But there’s something else going on. There’s a testing that’s independent of everything I’m doing. And none of us has the language skills to deal with it.

I’m angry at the kids. I feel like a failure myself. I’m frustrated, scared about how to get things back on track, disappointed in them and myself, feeling helpless and wanting the whole thing to be over. Sympathy for the difficulty of their plight — being tossed into a class way over their head, beyond their capacity, outside of their area of interest (content-based at its worst) and hard to customize to their experience (because they’re being tested on the exact material in the book and not their comprehension of strategies and structures), and being raced through material without concern for their inability to grasp it — has turned to anger.

For example, I’ve been writing lesson plans with a column dedicated to language objectives. But last night as I started to write the next, wanting just to get through the material as the book suggests and creativity and concern be damned, I found myself writing notes such as these in that column: “get through the lesson,” “establish order.” And in the column for larger objectives: “Objective: get through the class without losing my will to live.”

And in the “activity” column: “What can I do with the dinosaurs I bought for the brats?”

I will need to talk to Magdalena to get a sense of how she appropriately corrects such situations. I imagine they’re afraid of her so that gets nipped in the bud. I don’t want this to be a class centered on rewards and consequences — I’d hoped I could create an engaging enough lesson plan to obviate that — and I don’t want that feeling again of wanting to discipline them. I know that doesn’t work. And I don’t want to be angry any more, because although I control it, kids aren’t dumb enough not to see it. What was strange was that the one time I put my foot down, as mentioned about, and said “don’t touch my things,” they kept touching them.

Boy, do I feel like a total loser.

So I need to revisit everything about how I’ve been teaching them. A carefully paced sequence of varied activities addressing all learning styles is not working. And I’m not going to try group work again, at least for a while, because every time I did, it turned into chaos. They seem to work best — perhaps by training — individually. There’s some chatting going on, but their focus is centered. Maybe that will no longer be true, but I’m going to try more individual activities. They can’t handle pairs or group work because they distract rather than help each other.

I was thinking of a jigsaw, which I think could work at the first part, but they won’t listen to each other for the actual piecing together. I’m afraid to have them all stand up at once for a gallery walk because all hell will break loose.

So I’m going to look online for “crowd control” methods. Surely many people have encountered this.

Then I will begin the class, somehow, with some sort of norm-setting. It will be very difficult because they’re not interested and they don’t know enough of the language, and vice versa. I will keep it simple. I think it might be appropriate to try to say that their behavior last week totally fails and I will ask one of them to write a rule on a piece of paper so it’s permanent. Something ridiculous like “I won’t talk in class unless the teacher asks me to.” Maybe I’ll begin by saying, “last week was no okay. Tell me what you all did that you think I’m talking about.” Have them write it on the board one by one. Turn it into rules. I can invite them to provide a rule for me, but I think that could get out of hand. I’ll see.

However, rules and norms are useless without consequences. So I need to find out what consequences there might be for disruptive behavior. And I’d rather develop a system to track and reward their successes instead.

I need to think of more individual activities, which is unfortunate because that makes peer scaffolding vanish. But right now in their group work, no peer scaffolding is happened: just riots.

I feel so out of my depth. I have never wanted to work with children, or should I say that I have always NOT wanted to work with children, and this is exactly why. With the additional challenge of our inability to communicate, I’m in a miserable state. I want to just give them the book and say, “Here, you feckers. If you know so much, you read it and you take the test. I’ll be in the next room smoking.” It’s the first time anger has surfaced at students, because their actions were so intentionally provocative. When I walked down the stairs I found one student (Lupita) had stolen my eraser and thrown it down the stairs.

I don’t know what I’ve done wrong, to allow things to get so out of hand. It all began when I tried to teach them after their first test. They were exhausted and a class was too much. Worse was after the second test, two days later. And by today, the wildness that I’d attributed to post-test-stress had become endemic.

Online at I just read an article about how to avoid problems in the first place. (It’s talking about college-age students in their native language): Handling Disruptive Students [“The following is a memo from the Faculty Senate Chair at Cuyahoga Community College (OH) suggesting ways for faculty members to handle disruptive students. http://www.oncourseworkshop.com/Miscellaneous003.htm]

• Model the behavior you expect; for example, come to class on time and prepared.

• Treat students firmly, right from the beginning, but treat them fairly and respectfully.
• Try to connect with students.  Be sure to know their names. Arrive early to class and stay afterwards to encourage students to talk to you.
• If it is possible, arrange seating so that you can move among the class; an instructor who seems less distant, even physically, from students will experience fewer behavioral infractions.

I’ve done all that. Here is an exercise from the same article that wouldn’t work with my group but it’s interesting:

A student in my Human Development class was angry, flip, aggressive, intimidating and rude to others. One day, the instructor facilitated a fish-bowl exercise.  This is an observation exercise that places half of the students in an inner circle  while the other half is asked to form an outer circle surrounding the students in the inner circle.  The inner circle of students is given an assignment to discuss an event, topic, article, play, etc. while the outer circles’ assignment is to make and record all observations. These observations were to be typed and turned in one week later.

On the day that the reports were due, students began circulating these reports. The student in question read the reports and was horrified to discover that most of the students who were a part of the outer circle wrote negative things about her attitude and behavior.  She was stunned, speechless and devastated, to say the least.  She loved attention but was unaware of how her negative behavior was affecting her classmates.  After reading these reports this student immediately changed her behavior.

—Edith Sorrell, Learning Community Mentor, Baltimore City Community College (MD)

And this [Dealing with Disruptive Behavior in the Classroom by Kathleen McKinney, Cross Chair in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning and Professor of Sociology, Illinois State University. http://www.cat.ilstu.edu/additional/tips/disBehav.php]:

1. Walk over to the talkative students and conduct class standing right next to them.
2. Stop whatever you are doing and wait (as long as it takes) for students to quiet down while you look at the disruptive students. Then begin again.
3. Note who the disruptive students are and speak to them after class or ask them to come to your office hours. Explain why/how you find them disruptive, find out why they are acting that way, ask them what they would be comfortable doing. Tell them what you want to do.
4. Discuss the disruptive behavior in private outside of class with some of the concerned and nondisruptive students. Ask for their assistance in maintaining a positive classroom environment.
5. On a given day when this behavior occurs change what you are doing. Break students in to groups for some work. Call on these and other students to come forward and lead discussion.
6. Consider changing the structure of the whole class. Is it all lecture and/or do students need to be more active and involved? Rethink if/how what you do fits the students and the course. Use more diverse techniques to reach the disruptive students.
7. Direct firm, but not derogatory, comments to the disruptive students during class. Ask if they have a comment or question. Ask them to be quiet. Let them know they are being unfair to their peers.
8. Inform the student outside of class that their disruptive behavior does not fit your criteria for participation and that their grade will be lowered if it does not stop (this one can be tricky in terms of what your syllabus says and how you handle it).
9. Spend some time in class discussing the whole situation openly and honestly with all the students. What do they think? Tell them how you feel. Ask how they think things should be handled. You may feel you cannot “waste” class time doing this BUT if class time is disrupted by students and this negatively affects your ability to work, teaching-learning is being harmed and the class time is already a waste.
10. Ask the student(s) to leave the classroom for that class period.
11. Inform the students that it is unfair to everyone for this behavior to continue and that you will not continue that class period until it stops. If it does not stop, tell the student you are leaving but they are still responsible for the material and welcome to come to your office hours. Leave.

I’ve done the italicized things already. Fail again. Separate posting I’ll put some advice I find specifically for children.