Good Intentions

Exactly two months ago, I started writing this blog post.  Here's what I wrote.

At what point are good intentions not enough?  I've had this conversation with several students as of late.  You can be apologetic and have all the good intentions in the world, but at some point, the behavior needs to change.

What about me?  Classroom management is a huge struggle for me, but I always look for the positives.  I'm doing better this year than my first, second, and third years of teaching.  I had a really serious last-chance conversation with a student this year that I would never have had the guts or the words to have before this year.  I've been way better about enforcing assigned seats.  I don't make a lot of threats regarding consequences or punishments for poor behavior, but when I do, I always follow through.

I fully intend to be stricter when it comes to encouraging and demanding good behavior, but at what point are my good intentions not enough?  My classes are still super chatty.  I still have kids who are rude and disrespectful - towards me and their classmates.  I still give kids too many chances.  The "good kids" are still frustrated by the interruptions from their classmates and my apparent inability to stop them, and I'd venture a guess that the disruptive classmates are also frustrated.

I do everything I can to keep kids in class even when they're misbehaving.  But why?  I could say that it's because it only makes it harder for the kid when they miss instruction.  Or that it's because I want to be understanding when a kid's having a bad day...or week...or...  And while there's probably some truth to all that, I think the real reason I keep kids in class even when they're misbehaving is that I'm afraid of how it will look if I keep sending kids to the office.  As if keeping kids in class is a sign that the problems must not be that bad.

And that's not fair to anyone.  It's not fair to the misbehaving students who need those boundaries.  It's not fair to the rest of the class whose learning is interrupted.  It's not fair to me and my sanity.  I need to hold my students to higher standards behaviorally.  I need to have higher expectations for them because I know they will meet them.  The average middle schooler is probably not looking to go above and beyond, but most kids will do at least enough to get by.  So I better make the qualifications for "getting by" a lot more rigorous.

It felt negative and pessimistic and I didn't want to publish it.  To me, it felt more like complaining than a reflection where I was seeking a better solution.  Around the same time I wrote the original post here, I gave my students a Teacher Report Card and blogged about the early results.  I gave students until the end of the quarter to respond, so it was only a couple of weeks ago that I got some of their final responses.  I've been using our vacation week this week to really dig into their feedback and make a plan for when we return to school.  Although Christmas break was only two months ago, and we've had snow days and holidays in between, I could not be more grateful for the time this week to refresh and reset!