Classroom Management

When I thought about being a teacher, I thought that the most difficult thing about it would be learning how to explain the materials, to always have them on the tip of my tongue and be responsive to any concerns that my students might have about the materials. This was true in my background, which was tutoring, where there was only one student at any time, and you had to tailor your class specifically to fit his needs. But In the modern school classroom, it is a whole other ball game, as they say. It isn't the teaching part that is hard about being a teacher, as strange as that may sound. It is the classroom management.

Students act up. They love to test you, and they do it at every chance that they get. This is especially true teaching eight graders, which is what I do. They haven't started to grow up at all, like they will in high school, but where they are they think that they're the top of the totem pole. Boy will ninth be a surprise for them. But in the mean time, I have to use every classroom management skill at my disposal.

There are classroom management programs, seminars, and online tools and many of these are useful, because they teach you step by step how to deal with specific behavior problems. Many people believe that just having teaching experience is enough, that they will learn classroom management skills by using them, but this simply isn't true. The teacher isn't just trying to manage the students. The students are trying to manage the teacher. If you let them, they will establish themselves in power before you have the chance to so much as lay down the ground rules. This is why good training in classroom management is so essential.

One classroom management course I took used this method. They advised to never let the kids say “I can't” or “I couldn't”. Instead, they have to say “I chose to”. So, they can't say that they couldn't do their homework last night, or that they couldn't finish their papers on time, but rather that they chose not to do their homework or complete their papers. This not only stops you from getting into arguments with the students and wasting precious class time, but also teaches them that they have to take responsibility for their own actions, a life lesson every bit as important as the other things they will learn in school.