I would like to talk to you about using a notebook for classroom administration. This is a two-parter; we’ll start with character 1: Notebooks as…sanity savers. This is for somebody who is still reasonably brand-new to teaching and for situations when you start to feel like your class is certainly coming out of control, and you’re at your wits’ end and you really just don’t know what to do. You’ve got a lot of kids talking, you’ve tried lots of different things and you’re maybe about to cry, so this is a really good disaster flotation device for you.
A plain notebook. And this is an issue which I did many times my first few years of learning… and even later. When you start to feel that you’re at your boiling point, you can just get a simple diary, pick it up, open it to a blank sheet, sit down, and start to write. You can stop in the middle of your educating — hurriedly. You don’t need to make any notices or anything. Just sit down and start to write. Every meter I did this, my whole class would be silent within 60 seconds because they were really confused about what I was doing.
Sometimes they are able to talk to each other and try to figure out what I was writing, or they would say, “She’s writing down your name! ” or “She’s…” you know … writing a referral to the part, or whatever … I would just be writing. Sometimes — a lot of times — I would be writing my own concludes to try to diffuse them a little bit and get my rage out. Sometimes I would be just writing a little analysis of what was actually happening in the room. It would help me to sort of figure out where the problems were, and so The thing that would really get the students is that I would write for a while and I would occasionally look up, and not apply nasty examinations or anything, just sort of courteous … and it truly caught them off-guard and got them silence. And the appeal of this is that it got my blood pressure access down and it got them calmed down, and I was able to make a smart decision from that top forward instead of time greeting and blowing up.
So … There is a much more advanced path to the usage of this same programme for classroom managing and I will talk about that in part 2. But — when you are in an emergency situation and you don’t know what else to do to get through the rest of your class period, draw out a notebook and start writing. I’ll see you in part two because once you’ve stopped using it as situations of the emergency implement, you can actually use it in a more organized way.
Stay tuned for part 2.
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