Monster Children

Today, I had my monster 1st graders.  I arrived 10 minutes early and in a bad mood, some morning errands hadn’t worked out particularly well.

When I walked into class, I noticed most of the kids running around the room and the teacher (who is young and fit but she doesn’t have any more of a grip on this group than I do, and she’s with them every day) was screaming at a couple of them at the front of the room.

Monster Children

Actually, I wonder how she remains sane.

Anyway, as soon as I stepped into the room, the kids swarmed me, as they do, knocked me to the ground and used me as a horse, or perhaps a pack mule or an elephant, because there were several of them up there.  I managed to shake them free and stagger to the front of the room.

The teacher told me she was going to be out of the room, but she had a special request:  try not to wind the kids up too much.  Well, that’s kind of the opposite of my style, I prefer to use their energy to get them into competitive games and try to wear them out with head and shoulders, knees and toes, the hokey pokey, stuff  like that.

But, none of that has ever worked anyway so I figured, O.K., I’ll try it her way.  I made them all sit in their seats and tried to persuade them to be quiet – sort of shoooosh, shoooosh, ssshhhh, SHUT UP! One little girl just burst out giggling every time I told them I was serious, they were going to have to behave and have a proper lesson.  She just couldn’t believe that I was going to be the disciplinarian.  I’m supposed to be the fun teacher, the easy teacher.

It took about 10 minutes before I could really talk to them at all, and even then…I pulled a chair to the front of the room and sat down (I almost never sit down.  Teaching is a performance.  Today was, too, but it was a different performance.)  Then I lectured them for about 10 minutes about what a horrible class they were and they needed to learn classroom discipline and especially never to interrupt an adult when he’s speaking, and how they’d probably have to repeat the 1st grade until they were 15.

I don’t think I reached them.  Then, I played a game which has been evolving over the course of this year but instead of having them all line up to play it I left them in their seats and only called the contestants up to the front of the room, 3 students representing the 3 teams -Pirates, Smurfs and Gougons, to clap their hands, turn around, touch their nose, drive a car, ski, brush their teeth, raise their hand (that one throws them every time), wash their hands, smile, cry, count to 10, and a few other things, until you have a winner and, since there were 3 teams, there were a lot of ties.

It worked much better with them in their seats.  Less pushing and shoving, and the punching and kicking was dramatically reduced.

I don’t know what I can do as I only have them once a week, but I felt today’s lesson actually went fairly well.