She may be a great sub! But don’t count on her being able to manage your Google classroom 🙂

Hi new teacher! This is not exactly a disciplinary post like the last few, although the wrong sub plans can create all sorts of disciplinary challenges. So can the wrong sub.

You want to have a relaxing professional development. You don’t want to come back to parent calls, paperwork and planning consequences. Those free-for-all days cause trouble even if nothing exactly triggered steps on the disciplinary ladder. Kids who sat next to their bestie all day may decide to push the limits when you come back, for example.

Here is the sub piece that you need to understand: Especially at first, every time you go out, you are playing sub poker. The deck probably contains aces, deuces, wildcards and everything in-between. Easier districts may have selected a fairly reliable sub pool, but tougher districts often end up accepting candidates whose main qualification is “willing to work in a middle school with few resources in the bottom 2% of state test scores where the police only come every few weeks.” Is that your school? If it is, thank you for having taken a demanding position in a place where your compassion and perseverance are desperately needed.

It helps to understand how the sub system works. Depending on where you teach, the system can differ but many districts now are using online services. You post your absence for the sub pool to see. A sub who wants to work sees that absence and clicks on some version of an accept button. Voila! You have a sub.

If you are lucky, that sub can teach. If you are lucky, that sub will teach. If you are lucky, that sub will not be bringing her own personal handouts or guitar to your classroom. At worst, your sub may carry a bundle of silent prejudices, quiet put-downs some kids will sense. I just worked with one who was receiving direct communications from the Lord. She seemed competent, and she had that classroom management piece down, but she also reminded me how little we know about these strangers who enter our classrooms.

Here are a few tips for those sub plans:

1. Leave extra and even extra, extra work. You might be tempted to leave one reading and a related worksheet that would take you and your classes a full class period. But you would take the time to teach the contents of the reading, and go over sections with students. The sub may just instruct students to pass out the papers and sit down at your desk to text her friends. Seriously. It happens. Even if the sub walks around the room, he or she may not interact much with students. You want students to be occupied for the entire period. So leave assignments two and three for when students are done with their first task. Or leave specific instructions for where they can go on their devices when they are done.
2. I personally suggest avoiding device-dependent lesson plans. Things go wrong. Then subs without passwords and/or tech chops have to figure out what to do. Many subs are retired teachers. Not all of them are conversant with the latest Google Doc Google Classroom Google World life in their old schools. Also those kids who want to go to their lockers for earbuds or chargers become one more complication as students try to test sub limits. Can the ten of us who are all suddenly having bathroom emergencies please all go to the bathroom at once? But it’s an emergency!
3. Paper is your friend, except for the part where you have to grade that huge stack of papers. For one thing, paper assignments keep your students off devices. That sub who sits down at your desk? She’s not watching what is happening on student devices. She should be, but woulda, coulda, shouda… Sub plans that allow the sub to say, “please close your Chromebooks” help ensure that inappropriate behavior does not become an issue for you when you return to school.  I suggest leaving instructions that students are not to use electronics while you are absent, unless you know you can trust those classes and you have a natural reason to use devices, such as a project due within the next few days.
4. Keep it simple. Don’t expect the sub to be able to do your routine unless you leave extremely-detailed instructions — which is fine, but tough to do. You probably don’t realize all the little things you are including in your morning routine. If you want to note them all down and prepare your lesson plan as you go through a day, well, your sub will probably be impressed and happy to see how well you planned.
5. Avoid group activities. Even if you can write down all your groups and how they function, they will probably not function as well for a sub, unless that sub works in your classroom regularly. The sub most likely does not know your students and that’s the main problem. When Jon decides to go work with another group, because his friend Eric is in that group, the sub won’t know, not at first. Jon may take advantage of the situation. All your little tools to keep groups in line may be unfamiliar to the sub as well. The “strikes” you give for off-task behavior? The sub may not know to give those “strikes” and kids may not take a sub’s strikes seriously anyway.
6. If you do have a strong reason to group, spell out expectations for group behavior in advance of your absence. I’d recommend doing this more than once. Any group arrangements should be practiced if possible so students know exactly where to go.
7. The easiest plan is an appropriate, useful reading for all with a set of questions related to that reading. Too long will be better than too short. You might group quietly by having different readings for different groups. Some class compositions truly are not meant for any version of whole-group instruction.
8. Did the sub do a great job? Hunt that sub down! Put him or her on your preferred list. Get a phone number. The more you can avoid random placements, the better.
9. Praise your sub, too. Tell the administration what a great job that sub did. Like teachers, subs too often do not get enough credit for excellent work.

You don’t have to smile all the time. You don’t have to seem warm and fuzzy. If you are doing your job, your students will sense your effort and commitment. You may not be a “popular” teacher, but your students will have your back. Sometimes I think education classes underestimate America’s children. Children know when people are trying to help them.

I saw a poster in a classroom yesterday that I liked:

As long as your kids understand your mission, you will be fine whether you can manage warm, fuzzy and fine or not.

Eduhonesty: One difficult part of classroom management for some starting teachers is a natural inclination toward the warm and fuzzy. You love kids, right? Most people who go into teaching love kids. That’s why they decide to teach, foregoing twice their starting salary by studying differentiation strategies instead of engineering.

But warm and fuzzy can be antithetical to classroom management. The degree of warm and fuzzy you can get away with will depend on the size and composition of your class, as well as your own ability to project authority. If projecting authority does not come naturally to you, warm and fuzzy may translate into “Yes, teacher, we will start the work as soon as we finish this game” or a sea of conversations that block all your best attempts to explain a set of directions.

You have to feel out this piece of advice for yourself. Maybe warm and fuzzy has been working great for you this year. Some teachers can get all the content across while still being a teacherly version of a Care Bear. If so, kudos, and feel free to completely ignore this post!

If classroom management has been providing moments or even days of stress, though, I will make an observation: Some students will take advantage of too nice or too understanding, and it only takes a few kids going off track to take a class off track in the wrong circumstances. Yes, Joey is tired, yes, Chloe is dealing with issues at home, yes Brandon is struggling with ADHD, and Kit has an eating disorder. You want to be kind. Letting your students off the hook on any regular basis will not be helping them, however. In the end, sixth grade will follow fifth, algebra will follow pre-algebra, and your job is to get Joey, Chloe, Brandon and Kit ready for their next adventure. That may require not smiling. That may require calling home regularly to get a student to do homework and classwork. That may require detentions and consequences, as well as the easier pep talks and offers of understanding.

Strictness works when students see that you are treating all your students in the same fashion, especially when praise is regularly bestowed for honest, diligent efforts. Joey and Chloe will do their best work when they know that you are paying attention to their attempts to keep learning.

Are you, possibly, being too kind? If you are spending a lot of time managing behaviors at this point in the year, you should at least look at the possibility. More detentions and fewer smiles may provide you with a more orderly daily environment — which will boost learning and lower your own blood pressure most likely.

P.S. Putting that Jobs poster on your wall could help you as you work to suppress those natural smiles that may be complicating your personal disciplinary piece.

Hugs from the Blue Room.

I taught bilingual middle school classes and I am clear on an aspect of the DACA fight that escapes many of our nation’s leaders. The stress that comes from being a dreamer child? That stress can be hell on wheels in some classrooms.

Whether it’s worrying about being deported, worrying about mom and/or dad being deported, worrying about never being able to get a college education or a professional job, all that worrying bleeds out into classrooms all over America. It’s the girl silently crying in the corner. It’s the boys and girls who start using alcohol and drugs to self-manage anxiety. It’s that kid who blows up at you when you start discussing college options, because all of the best options appear out-of-reach. I’ve written other posts about life without that critical social security number.

In this set of posts for new teachers with classes that are spinning out of control, I will simply observe that dreams may be part of your problem. Please keep in mind when you give your “so you are ready to be an astronaut or even President” speeches that some kids in your room may feel zero hope that they can even be a registered nurse — the background check shuts that down — and those kids may only be further demoralized by your speech. If you have immigrants in your room, your pep talks must be crafted carefully.

Dreamers can be tough sells where education is concerned, and tough sells often create disciplinary challenges. You may not be entirely able to solve this fact, depending on who landed in your class this year. Here’s a list of a few things that may help:

1. Sit with those kids who are struggling, and if they tell you they see no point in education, respond that they can never know when education will be useful. I had a story of a Spanish professor who had been thrown out of Cuba and lost everything, but then became a respected university professor in a small town in Washington State. “They can take everything away from you,” he said, “but not your education.” It’s true.
2. Sit with those kids who are struggling and just let them know that their learning matters to you, enough so that you will set aside time to make sure that they have help as they master new concepts.
3. Enlist your problem kids to help you keep classroom order. Sometimes kids will do for their teacher what they will not do for themselves. I used to look at assignments and think, “I wish you would do this for you, not me,” but as long as I got the assignments, I could continue to work on the pep talks.
4. Call home. Get parents to start giving education pep talks, too. They probably have been doing so for years, but sometimes you will benefit if parents understand their son or daughter needs a “booster shot.”
5. Depending on your student and that student’s mindset, you might point out that laws change all the time, and even if the law is one way today, that does not mean that law cannot change radically in one session of Congress. I ‘d say be careful with this piece of advice, though. Your doomsayers may come back. “Yeah, they might come for us next week!” These are scary times and your students do not see Congress as their friend.
6. Praise real efforts.
7. In practical terms, put your disaffected dreamers near the front, and preferably not together. My seating chart would put those dreamers with hardworking students. You want elbow partners to model the behavior you are looking to create.
8. Don’t forget to share the load. The social worker and counselors can provide a great deal of help.
9. Remind yourself of the social forces affecting your classroom. Your classroom does not behave like Ms. Smith’s when you were in school? Your students are probably not Ms. Smith’s students — and some differences in class composition can be determinative in terms of disciplinary challenges.
10. On the other hand, if Ms. Smith’s class looked a lot like your class, maybe you should go find Ms. Smith and ask for her advice. I guarantee you your old teacher will be happy to help and grateful to know you noticed how well her efforts worked. The odds are good that she will be delighted to see you. Teachers love to discover they inspired the kids in their care to become teachers themselves.

Eduhonesty: This post is mostly targeted to teachers of middle school and high school students, but younger students with older siblings may be grappling with dreamer challenges as well. That little girl who tells her older brother she wants to be a doctor or teacher may get slammed with the “You have no social so you can’t!” message. I would not bring dreamer issues up with younger kids, who may be blissfully oblivious, but I would be alert to the concern with even the youngest kids. A preschool class I taught in last year had two fathers facing deportation. 

Hello again, new teacher!

Many first graders expected to meet the Common Core standards will feel stressed and stupid. Better teachers can help control for this, but kids notice when other kids can do classwork more quickly and easily. Especially when the range in performance is great, kids at the bottom are likely to conclude other kids are smarter than they are — no matter how much time we spend emphasizing that everyone has their own special intelligences. As educational reformers raise the standards bar throughout our grades and schools, I believe one byproduct of new, tougher standards has been greater numbers of lost kids, especially in financially- and academically-disadvantaged schools.

Those lost kids are often central to classroom disciplinary meltdowns. If the day’s plan is too far from what Jonah can do, no one should be surprised when Jonah starts poking friends, tossing erasers or sketching male body parts on papers, books and desks. Incomprehensible material = boring, and bored students will find something to do with their time.

Eduhonesty: Sometimes Jonah does not need a new seat in a new seating chart as much as he needs tutoring, from you or from an outside source. Jonah may require extra time, or he may require adapted materials. If you start adapting materials, you should also start recording Jonah’s deficits. Too many adapted assignments and Jonah should be identified as a possible candidate for special education. In many districts, that special education placement will not happen without reams of documentation carefully noted down over months of observations, so the sooner you start, the better.

Student melt downs? Try extra tutoring, combined with other scaffolding and supports designed to make academic success a possibility. Many behaviors improve dramatically with hopes of academic (and social) success. When possible, involve parents in helping with challenging academics too.

And praise, praise, praise real academic successes when they occur — but only real successes. You want to avoid praising schlock work because if you praise schlock work, you will receive schlock work. That success you praise does not have to be an impeccably written paragraph; it can be any paragraph that shows thought, effort and progress toward understanding new material.

A side trip:

During my last formal year teaching, I held Saturday morning tutoring at the McDonalds near school. My kids could not pass the East Coast consulting firm-prepared, 7th grade Common Core unit tests that I was required to give them, tests set years above their benchmark-confirmed knowledge levels. They could almost never pass the quizzes based on those tests, quizzes which were required every Friday. So we met at odd hours, the afternoons being pretty much sucked up by meetings. I gave them their chance to pass quizzes. By October, we were doing alright, and by winter we were a hard-working team, but to those newbies out there who are having a tough year, I was nearly at retirement and I had an absolutely hellish September my last year. Being obliged to present incomprehensible material day-after-day gave me the toughest start I can ever remember. Once the kids understood that the whole grade was being obliged to take the same Friday quizzes and unit tests, and that I truly had no choice (the Principal had threatened to fire me if I did not go with the program, although I did not share that fact), I got the disciplinary piece in control, and we got our groove back, but I got a great firsthand look that last year at what happens when required content is incomprehensible and undoable. A class operating at a third-grade level mathematically cannot succeed on seventh-grade Common Core Unit Tests, although class members who can be convinced to attend tutoring will learn a great deal of math.

P. S. Absent more time in school, and extra tutoring, I don’t see how harder, Common Core-based tests will help disadvantaged students more than earlier state standardized tests did. But the standards movement has so much momentum that many districts no longer even question the desirability of new demands. As a teacher, you are probably writing down standards you intend to cover on your board, on poster paper, or somewhere else for students to see, making changes weekly or even daily. Even if  you go over those standards, I suspect many students pay as much attention to the week’s standards as they do to the local newspaper’s real estate section. When I see those standards written in preschool and early elementary classrooms, I laugh sometimes. Admin can’t read the lesson plan? The kids can’t read most of what’s on the board, that’s for sure.

More advice for newbies struggling with disciplinary challenges. 🙂

We are so rushed. We have units to finish, data charts to prepare, students to tutor, meetings to attend, more meetings to attend, grades to finish, comments to add to grades we must submit, parent calls to make, emails to send, Google docs to share, and so on and on and on.

This post will be a suggestion to slow down in critical places — in particular the start of the class period and that time before beginning new activities. In elementary school, I would say to slow down at transition points. Some students need repetition. They need every “t” crossed and every “I” dotted. Two extra minutes explaining your activity may save you ten minutes or more of re-explaining expectations and procedures. Those saved minutes don’t include the easier disciplinary day you will likely gain from extra explanation. Students who go off the rail in the middle of an activity? Sometimes this happens because they were not sure what to do next, so throwing erasers at Fred just seemed like a good idea in the interim.

Take your time when sharing directions and expectations. With younger kids, have them repeat the directions and expectations. With older kids, give your group ample time to ask questions. Maybe pose a few questions yourself: “Now when you finish selecting the length of your Martian months, what will you do next?”

Your goal is to keep students occupied in learning, in bell-to-bell instruction. Explicit directions help enormously. Repeating an important idea twice often helps. I once knew a calculus teacher who repeated everything she said twice. Her students stayed with her as she did this, and I am sure they had an easier time learning new content because of her slower but thorough approach.

Clearer expectations help prevent disciplinary meltdowns. Kids stay calmer when they know what to do. When students get done with Part B, you want everyone to know how to begin Part C with no detours into eraser tossing, head-butting or body-part drawing. Because, let’s face it, some kids do the darnedest things when left to their own devices.

Eduhonesty: A few extra minutes spent up front often saves chunks of time later.

Hi new teacher! If the desks look like this, and you are not doing a special activity, I recommend moving “desks” up to the front of your discipline improvement strategy. Desk placement should become a priority. I won’t spend time on exactly where to put desks; The internet provides plenty of charts and advice. 

It’s easy to let the desks slide, literally and figuratively. There’s so much to do! Especially in states demanding the Common Core, material expected to be covered may seem daunting with an academically-challenged group. When Enzo pushes his desk toward the heater, you may decide to let that desk shift. Enzo wants to be warmer. You want to be kind.

Eduhonesty: That kindness will make your life more difficult. Once Enzo moves, Jessie will want to move beside the heater, too. Genesis will push away from the back row toward the back wall. Marisombra will turn a desk to face a friend. Some of the changes will be understandable and innocuous. Genesis may even do better in isolation against that back wall. But now you are dealing with a shifting students who believe they have a right to shift at will. They may sense they are taking advantage of your kindness, but if their moving desks allow them to talk to friends more easily, some desks will gyre and gimble in the wabe, and certain mome raths will be outgrabing every chance they get. Meanwhile, you will be trying to get all that slithery talking and commotion to stop so other students can hear you explain your Google slides or PowerPoint.

The desk line needs to hold. The seating chart needs to hold. While YOU can relax that chart by creating groups for your new project and reassigning students, students must understand that YOU choose the seats.

Controlling desk and student placement saves minute after minute, hour after hour. Student distractions are minimized and students become more likely to work instead of trying to find out just how many inches they can go toward the heater or that friend on the left. Every distraction you can eliminate becomes one more win for learning, and minutes saved will add up steadily as the year goes by.

It’s late in the year. You can still take a stand on desks, however. Explain why the system is changing. Explain why you expect desks to stay in place, emphasizing the loss of learning time that has occurred because of desk movement. Then make those desks and associated student movement a priority. Call parents if you must. Write referrals if you must. Issue reminders throughout the day.

Seating sometimes gets neglected because of the sheer size of the teaching workload, and the struggle to prioritize as you begin to learn your craft. But not much that you do matters more than where you sit certain students with respect to other students. An appearance of order will also provide subtle support in other ways. Kids tend to behave better in neater and cleaner surroundings.

Have a great week!

Hi, new teacher. See my preceding post for evaluation advice that may be useful next year, even if this year’s evaluations have flown by.

Going back to March’s current struggles, these posts are based on the presumption that one or more of your classes have slipped off the leash. The students in that class don’t follow the rules. They waste time. They listen only intermittently. They talk, talk, talk. And you are having about as much fun as a goldfish in a school of piranhas. Thinking of that class may even make you wonder if the money you spent on education classes went toward the wrong major.

Take a deep breath. Remember, the research shows that first- and second-year teachers underperform their more experienced colleagues. Some people do seem to be naturals, but many starting teachers struggle, especially those working in academically underperforming districts. You are not alone. Your administration will probably support you, too, if you show that you are trying to learn your craft.

Don’t be afraid to ask for a little help — although too many requests for help can prove problematic. A fine line exists between “I could use some advice,” and “I don’t know what I am doing.” You want your Principal to believe you are passionate about learning your craft as you ask to go to that professional development on classroom management, to see you as a teacher-in-the-making. But too many and too plaintive requests for help can result in a Principal thinking, “I don’t know if Jones has what it takes.”

So pace those requests for help. Spread out those requests for help. Find informal mentors as well as assigned mentors to give you advice — maybe even people you know in other school districts. Get tips from more experienced colleagues in district and elsewhere. Read books on teaching. Make new seating charts while you experiment on your own. If you try to get all your help from too few sources, you risk becoming a pest.

Be careful not to be too dramatic as you seek advice. Don’t tell your mentor that 7th period is out of control. Tell her that behaviors are slowing down learning. Ask for help managing specific behaviors and events. Hone in on the problems you want to fix first. You might want to start with talking, for example. Ask friends and mentors how they manage talkers who are not listening to presentations.

Eduhonesty: My advice for today’s short post is to break down your struggle with your personal “7th period” into as many pieces as possible. Then prioritize. Which problems are hurting learning the most? Tackle those problems first, in small groups or one at a time. As pieces begin to fall into place, other problems may solve themselves.

The more detail you can provide for a specific problem, the more likely that colleagues can and will be able to help you. Just as “Can you help me jump my battery” can be counted on to work better than “Can  you fix my engine?”, a specific request such as “Can you share some strategies on how to keep Johnny from getting out his seat?” will work better than, “Can you tell me what to do with Johnny?”

If you are reading this post, you may be having a tough March. Please remember — Classroom management gets easier. You will learn the traps that steal your class minutes. You will find your style.

Hugs and hang on to that growth mindset. 🙂

Hi New Teacher! Or anyone who has had a tough year with 7th period or the like….

So you followed the many instructions from your professors at school. Maybe you even contacted a few of them for advice. You put all the supports into place. You defined roles and expectations. You asked coaches for advice (but not TOO much advice) and you sought out a classroom management seminar, not to mention a few webinars. You gave the management piece your very best shot.

Middle school and high school teachers: Is the movie title that comes to mind when you look at your 7th period “National Lampoon’s Animal House”? Maybe you are trying to teach the First World War, and at least a few students seem determined to model that war in your own classroom. (Hopefully you have not reached the “Nightmare on Elm Street” or “Children of the Corn” movie stage. 🙂 )

Practical advice: I’m late with this advice, but some readers may benefit.

If you are coming up for an evaluation, think ahead. You may be given a choice as to which class will be observed. Prepare a sound reason why that period should not be 7th period. Some possibilities:

1. We are working on reinforcement right now. I would rather present an original lesson.
2. I could use some advice in 4th period due to the number of students with IEPs that require accommodations. I am not always sure how to include my lowest students. (Any area in a class that is functioning well where you can use advice makes a perfect suggestion.)
3. I get nervous when I think about being evaluated. I would be happy to get my evaluation out of the way early if that works for your schedule.

The above assumes that you do not have a disciplinary meltdown underway, just one tough class or two. It only takes one student to make a class more difficult. Two or three can complicate life enormously for a new teacher.

Eduhonesty: I will be floating shortly.  As a retired teacher who subs, I sometimes pick the mystery lollipop, labeled “floater” on the sub system. I think I will publish this and finish it later. If readers know anyone who might benefit, please pass this on.

Response to feedback: In response to comments, I’d like to agree this post has an odd feel. It’s not the usual post about how to get ready for an evaluation with reminders about incorporating visuals and managing transitions. Yet I feel the need to share these thoughts.

The teaching evaluation process can be inherently unfair, filled with politics and based on sometimes only an hour or two’s real-life observation. I once watched a second-year colleague get axed essentially because a group of girls (who liked me a lot, thank God) decided to take her down. Kids understand the evaluation process. That out-of-control class which first and second-year teachers may encounter can result in an ugly evaluation that unfairly targets a teacher. My second-year colleague wanted so badly to be a great teacher, and I believe she would have reached her goal. She never got her chance. She never got a second chance, either. Her area of endorsement was too crowded.

Especially in schools where administration turns up rarely, maybe only for evaluations, teachers must strategize to put their best groups forward for review.

P.S. Stuck with that review of 7th period? Plan and strategize the heck out of that lesson plan. Do a version of the plan a few times before game day so that everyone knows exactly what must be done. Consider sacrificing a few of the evaluation shibboleths if you don’t think your class can manage them well. For example, skip the gallery walk if Nathan, Johnny and friends are likely to sabotage that walk. Only do activities you know your class can do well.

Before the evaluation, throw out carrots and raise the specter of a few sticks.  “I’d like to relax the seating chart sometimes but I have to know we can manage if…” or “I really hope to make some positive phone calls home this week-end to tell your parents how well everyone has been doing.”

The big issues are taking me down out here. I am avoiding the news. I feel like holding up a cross and throwing holy water at the T.V. every time my husband summons Wolf Blitzer into my home. Instead, I retreat to Words with Friends, good books and stashed paint brushes.

I will march on the 24th to add my voice to the cry for gun control, but I just shake my head at the relative who bought an automatic weapon for fear sales will be shut down next month. There’s been a big run on guns that spray bullets in a continuous stream. My relative, his friend, and some random guy got the last automatic weapons in a local gun shop. Never mind that my relative already owns a big, scary, automatic rifle. The waiting period before you can take your spiffy new automatic rifle home is a full 24 hours in Illinois, by the way. You have to wait 72 hours to take your handgun home.

I know who to hunker down with during the zombie apocalypse, anyway.

So for a while, I plan to drop the big issues. Last year I did a series of tips for new teachers. Let’s resume those tips. Admittedly, March seems an odd time to strike out in this direction since you new teachers made it this far. You are probably feeling much less shaky than you did in August. If not, maybe my tips will help.

The following tip is part of a larger concept: You need to hoard classroom minutes. Those minutes are the lifeblood of learning.

Tip #1: Your classroom, your rodeo. You are in charge. Don’t let education school idealism make you treat your room like a democracy. Yes, students should have input. They should help you make the rules so they can have ownership in those rules. Kids push back against excessive authoritarianism and feelings of powerlessness. But even social scientists freely concede that democracies tend to be inefficient users of time. We wait to vote after long discussions and thousands of advertisements, advertisements we evaluate and sort.

One of the first teaching big lessons I had to learn was not to listen too much or too often to attempts to change routines. As soon as rules become negotiable, you will find a pack of future attorneys willing to argue for hours. “But you let us listen to music during the Civil War activity,” one kid will say, and others will then chime in. “Yeah, and music helps me to concentrate.” “Ms. Smith let us listen to music.” “Music relaxes me so I can read better.” “I think we should decide when we need music to concentrate, not the teachers.”

Minutes will always slip away. A student will walk into the room carrying a stack of official letters from the office to pass out and there goes yet another closing activity. You don’t want to freely give your minutes away, however, and if kids think they can change classroom procedures by talking at you — Oh, will they talk!

You may be tempted to say, “O.K. Music is fine,” but that choice will come back to bite you the next day or the day after that.

“You let us do it last week!” “Yeah!” “Please?!?”

Eduhonesty: The rules should be clear. The rules should hold. If you relax the rules, you must be explicit about why that relaxation is occurring and firm about the fact that this one-time exception does not mean the rule has changed. Kids being kids, I recommend relaxing the rules only in exceptional situations, and briefly explaining why you are allowing a change.

P.S. It’s March. Have you relaxed those rules? Maybe too many of those rules? Trying to reclaim your rules at this stage may lead to open rebellion. It’s far, far easier to loosen up than to abruptly get stricter. I’ll address the tricky question of reinstating rules in my next post.