As you venture back into the classroom, I hope you are excited at the prospect of the next semester. This post is for newbies and anyone interested in classroom management.

Teachers are taught to invite discussion. We are shown ways to create classroom rules through democratic processes, for example. Students sometimes choose the rules for their classroom with guidance from a questioning teacher. Mostly, this democratic process triumphs since students know the answers to the Making-Rules Quiz. They have been using similar rules for years. Teachers may throw in prompts, pointing out useful words like respect.

Discussion can be overrated, however. Explanations can also be overrated. For one thing, five minutes explaining why we keep our hands to ourselves represents a time loss of 25 students X 5 minutes or 125 total possible learning minutes. By this time of the school year, the explanations should mostly be done, except for a few exceptional new transgressions. (We don’t sanitize people’s shoes without their permission might be one case in point.) When transgressions arise now, I recommend taking the responsible student aside while other students work if you feel that student needs clarification on the rules.

I also recommend skipping the explanations entirely sometimes. Feel free to say “no,” just the single word “no,” without explaining or justifying yourself. “No.” This one word can say it all. If a student demands an explanation, tell that student that you don’t have time to explain during class because you have too much material to cover, although the student is welcome to come talk with you about your decision before or after school. I always figure any student who cares enough to stay after school to get an explanation deserves an answer.

But you are the Captain of your ship. We should teach democratic processes in our classrooms, but our classrooms are not democracies. If they were, many students would spend most of the day in gym, art or recess between bouts of eating pizza and cheese fries.