Sydney Mitchell
Dr. Sonia Begert
English 101
5 December 2012
Imagine a room plagued by chaos. Swear words vandalizing your ears, children screaming and running throughout, desks and chairs strewn along the floor, the students blissfully oblivious to the fact that they are being utterly disrespectful to the authority figure standing timidly by the door. Now take a moment and replace that image with an orderly classroom occupied by students eager to learn, their attention directed solely at the teacher who is standing at the head of the class. What is the difference between these two scenarios, you ask? There is a certain component missing, a key ingredient; mutual respect. Regardless of the age of the students or the subject being taught, the component that is most necessary in a classroom is respect. Respect, as a give-and-take entity, enables the teacher to capture the students’ full attention and interest while still enabling the students to explore their creativity and grow as individuals, learning in a way that speaks to them. Unfortunately respect can be difficult to cultivate in an unruly classroom. If I was given the responsibility of managing an unruly classroom and cultivating respect, I would strive to get their attention, present myself as an unwavering authority, raise the bar for my students, and strive to teach them material that they would not only enjoy but also use in daily life.
Methods of kindling respect will vary depending on the age of the students and the subject at hand. Therefore in order to accurately mold our tactics around the situation we must first set the stage. If I were to teach I would choose to be a tenth grade English Communications teacher because as C.S. Lewis so eloquently put it, “Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides, and in this respect it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.” Literature is a key component to allowing creativity into academics as well as developing communication skills, which integrates into everyday life.
We must come up with some attention-grabbing, jaw-dropping antic to effectively gain and maintain the students’ attention. As Barry Boyce said it in his essay A Real Education, “attention is one of the greatest challenges for children, and perhaps only more so in a world offering so much distraction so frequently.” As the students began to trickle into the classroom on the first day of class, I would close my eyes and remain silent as I wrote on the blackboard, allowing jagged, erratic scribbles to craft my story. I would remain completely engrossed in my work, thinking freely, writing whatever came to mind upon the board and crossing out that which didn’t please me. As the last few students settled into their seats and gazed upon their mysterious teacher, I would suddenly stop and step back, silent for a moment before reading my story aloud. The story would need to be captivating and shocking, enough so to leave an impression. I would then instruct the students that throughout the semester they would be learning to craft works such as this by letting their mind wander to the places they thought they dare not go, for it is the dark recesses of our creative brain that contain the greatest topics. Not only would the students enjoy his exercise because it should allow them be boldly imaginative, but they would also be quite entranced in knowing that I was taking them on an adventure and they wouldn’t quite know what to expect. I would certainly keep them on their toes.
Secondly, I would stick to my word and whether I made promises of reward or consequence, I would be sure to implement those actions. By standing my ground and staying true to my pre-discussed arrangements which would also be presented on the first day of class, the students would recognize that I held to my word with the utmost dedication. Granted, there must be a balance somewhere in the middle of the spectrum ranging from dictatorial authoritarian to complete pushover. In A New Spelling of My Name, Audre Lorde writes of her experiences in the school system as a young girl, musing “my first grade teacher, Sister Mary of Perpetual Help, was a disciplinarian of the first order…a week after I started school she sent a note home to my mother asking her not to dress me in so many layers of clothing because then I wouldn’t feel the strap on me behind when I was punished.” The notion that a mere first grader would experience this form of discipline is heart wrenching. No child of any age should be treated in this way. Thus, we must take this extreme and pull it a bit down the spectrum towards a gentler touch. If we can achieve a healthy balance of authority, then we are already well on our way to acquiring the respect of students, because they will respect discipline, just as they will appreciate reward.
Often it seems that teachers allow their students to scrape by in class, putting forth the bare minimum of effort and allowing excuses for what is best described as sheer lack of discipline. The 2010 documentary film Waiting for ‘Superman’ gives us the term “dropout factories,” which is defined as a high school where “no more than sixty percent of freshmen make it to senior year.” The school districts shake their heads at these numbers, pointing their fingers at the students. It never ceases to amaze me the way in which we tend to scoff at our students’ plummeting grades and their lack of self-motivation, because how can we expect any different if we as teachers do not expect them to succeed and believe they have the power to do so? If we raise the bar of expectations, the students will quite naturally rise to it, or at least make more of an effort to do so. The students would not only respect me as their teacher for helping them set and achieve a higher goal, but they would respect themselves for completing the task which they previously thought impossible; setting a high bar and rising to it.
However above all else, I believe that it is of the utmost important to avoid teaching monotonous materials solely for the sake of hoping to get students to do well on a standardized test. In his essay The Banking Concept of Education, Paulo Friere states that traditional, droning education often “anesthetizes and inhibits creative power, whereas give-and-take education involved a constant unveiling of reality.” In my classroom, I would teach my students not only about English and communications, but how this subject relates to art, integrity, passion, and how these qualities would help them exceed in all areas of life. Furthermore, in his piece I Just Wanna Be Average Mike Rose acknowledges “it is true that we’ve created an educational system that encourages our best and brightest to become cynical grade collectors and, in general, have developed an obsession with evaluation and assessment.” I would strive to show my students the power of knowledge and the endless positive ramifications their dedication could have not only on their grades, but their lives.
Taming a wild classroom is no easy feat, and many teachers would run with their tail between their legs if presented with this task. However I truly believe that if I were a teacher I could successfully turn the chaos into a productive learning environment, As discussed, I would do this through the use of inspiration, a firm hard, realistically high expectations and entrancing curriculum. However what all of these tactics boil down to is as simple as respect. A classroom with respect would imply that the teacher takes interest in each of his students, understands and cares about their own needs and wants, and that the students themselves are eager to listen and learn. In my classroom, respect would be the first lesson.
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Waiting for ‘Superman’. Dir. Davis Guggenheim. Lesley Chilcott, 2020. DVD.
(quote; ‘dropout factories, no more than sixty percent of freshmen make it to senior year.’)
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Random House Digital, Inc.. Jan 1,1982 Print
Rose, Mike. Phd. “I Just Wanna Be Average” (n.d.): n. pag. English 122-35&37 – Writing
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<htttp:www.middlesexcc.edu/faculty/Robert_Roth/rosetext.htm>
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