In order for the timetables to work I teach a year nine class once every two weeks. My first meeting with them came on Thursday and it didn't go well.
Firstly it was extremely hard work to get them sat in their correct places. I had a seating plan their regular teacher uses and wanted them to stick to it. They did not do this well, lied about their names and were generally useless. Whilst using every trick in the classroom management handbook to get one boy to sit in his correct place another boy decided to start banging his hands on the table. This spread like wildfire around the room.
In these kind of situations you can either plough on on your own or get back up. It's always preferable if you can sort things out for yourself but it's better to get help before anyone dies. I metaphorically kicked the percussionist into the corridor and got a more experienced member of the department to help me out. She glowered and nagged at them. She'd taught some of them before so was able to shame them into submission.
Thankfully this had the desired effect and we were able to get on with the lesson, even meeting our learning objectives. It was a stressful experience though and I was actually sweating.
When lesson go wrong you sometimes wonder to yourself if you could have done things better. Did you deal with certain situations in the correct manner? Was the lesson actually good enough to stop the pupils from straying off-task? Was I in a bad mood for some reason? I try to be sympathetic and respectful towards my pupils because there are times when they find it genuinely difficult to behave and it's not their fault.
Sometimes though they're just being little shits.
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2008-09-20 @ 10:41