Absolutely Mortified

I’m, once again, frustrated with my class. 3B specifically. They have, officially, lost review game privileges, and I am absolutely sore at them at the moment. Sometimes it seems like that treat me like a teacher, and they sometimes seem to think that I cannot actually do anything to me. They seem to think that how they act towards me will have no consequence, or, more accurately, I have to be the nice, fun teacher. And I like to be fun – that is no lie. I like making class interesting and making up a lot of different activities for teaching the subject that we are going over. I like turning the class over to the students for discussion, only facilitating a lot of the time. It is certainly a lot more interesting that lecturing all day. But 3B makes that impossible, and that doubles my workload because I have to make a lesson plan for them and one for the other classes that do not act out.

            I was so embarrassed on Wednesday, the last time I was in class with them. I had reviewed with 2A and 3A earlier in the day, and that had gone well. The Jeopardy game was a success, and everyone did fairly well at it. Those who did not do well were able to go online to prepare too, so that went well.

3B had to ruin that trail of good feelings. I don’t know – maybe it is because they had been cooped up in the cafeteria because of rain for the last two days, or maybe it is something in the air. My mother swears her classes act out on the full moon, and there was a full moon approaching, but they were loud enough that they disrupted the next class over. It was embarrassing, and I was mortified when Mrs. Walls came in. We assigned them book work for the rest of the class period, they had review game privileges taken away, and they were assigned extra homework to finish in lieu of the game review.

I have been left to stew in my feelings over the experience. Clearly I have a lot to learn about classroom management. How do I get that class to behave? I cannot be that bad at classroom management either, given that my other classes all behave. But what am I doing wrong?