Firefighting- Classroom Style

Dominique Education, Parenting Views Classroom, Education, Teaching muses

Earlier this month I wrote about how I motivate the students in my classroom. In this post I’ll be opening up to you what I face in the classroom on a daily basis.

Teaching is simply exhausting. There are 101 items which one must handle daily on top of teaching the given syllabus and performing conflict management simultaneously.

Everyday fresh new challenges are thrown as me when I enter the class  and address the 42 individuals with the unique personalities. It had been a bit overwhelming for me when I first took charge of this class but I have been slowly getting to know then and their peculiarities.

On a single day I have to deal with :

• students being verbally abusive to both peers and teacher
• defiant students.
• petty complains about other pupils.
• chasing after pupils to complete and hand in their homework on time.
• being constantly interrupt by students requesting to visit the toilet.

For 8 hours a day I have to deal with more then 100 different pupils as we take multiple students depending on our subject combination.

For me I take my main class English, Science, Art, Social Studies and Health Education. On top of that I have 4 additional classes of Art and 2 additional classes of Health Education.

I realized after handling this extremely large group of kids that the best way would be to treat them like toddlers. Most of my students are still extremely attention seeking  and some of them are actively seeking my attention  by being disruptive in class.

Here are some tips for beginning teachers/parents on dealing with kids of different personalities.

1. Make your expectations  and   rules  clear from the start of the year. Ink them down and paste them in a prominent spot in the room. This will serve as a constant reminder to students what you are expecting from the students.

2. List down your to-do-list on a daily basis.

   I do this so that the pupils know what they are suppose to do and the time frame allocated for each activity. This also ensures that they are kept on track to complete the given class work.

3. Give verbal warnings and follow through on any punishments if they have to be carried out. I will write down the name of the errant pupil on  a corner of the board if they do not cease misbehaving after two warnings. These pupils would have to have a one to one conferencing session with me after class.
   

4. Have a tick -off  list u to monitor your pupils performance. I have a multi-tabbed Excel spreadsheet for every class that I teach where I record down the grades each student received for all tests and exams administered, whether they handed in their homework punctually [ Each type of homework is dated and color coded for easy reference on the spreadsheet]  I also record any offences or praiseworthy mentions of the student which could be feedback to the parent during the parent teacher meeting session.

How do your children’s teachers deal with them
in the classroom?