Tuesday, November 15, 2005

Monday Demons

Have you ever just not liked about 50 eleven year olds all at one time? No really, think about it - I'll give you time.
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So, as you might have guessed, classes this morning did not go that well. The ratio of devil children to normal/good children in my Monday morning classes is about 10:1. So, out of the 100 kids I see in the morning about 10 of them are good. With the 90 (or so) other children, I feel like I should draw a pentagram on the floor and send them back to their maker.

Honestly.

The vast majority of my kids are very sweet, friendly and will work hard in my classes. But there is just something about my Monday morning classes (let's throw in half of Thursday too) that just makes me want to wear all black and conjure the evil beast that created them.

One of the problems is that there is no way for me to discipline the bad students. Why? Well, we were told that none of the teachers discipline their students. There is no "D.R." that I can send them to and I can't send them in the hall or anything like that. Nose again the blackboard - nope, corner - nada, anything that would embarrass them - bu hao.

We were told that we can't do anything that would physically, mental or emotionally make the child feel bad about his or her self. If the child does the teacher is held responsible. If the child kills his or her self then the headmaster is fired. So, others are held responsible for how the child acts. Kind of feels like blackmail to me.

The only tools I have are to tell the class to "be quiet" (how often did you pay attention to that in school?) and make a symbol with my hands that looks like "T" which means stop. Yeah right.

So, I am appealing to all of you out there, any ideas to help exorcise my Monday demons?

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