Shakespeare on Classroom Management

A little fire is quickly trodden out;
Which, being suffered, rivers can not quench.
-William Shakespeare
King Henry VI

See? Even Shakespeare understands that classroom management has to do with staying on top of the little things. A couple of my girls decided to create a water gun out of a Dasani bottle today. What a great way to end the day. (In case you're mis-reading the previous sentence, read it again with twice as much sarcasm.) I suppose I should have had my eyes open for something like that... But then again, why? Why should I have to be prepared to deal with a situation like that? I mean, shouldn't these kids know better than this?

Yeah, yeah... they're kids and they're learning to know better. But by the time I was 15 or 16 I know that I wouldn't have pulled a stunt like that in the classroom. (Ok... re-reading that sentence, I feel a couple decades older.)

I've instituted a policy that my students can no longer stand by the door before they leave because too many of them (read greater-than-or-equal-to 1 of them) leave early and disrupt other classes in the hall. This policy has worked well, though they're beginning to come closer to the door each day. I need to remind them that they should be at their seats until the bell rings. So, I'm slowly (very slowly) getting this classroom-management thing down.

One of the "best practices" of teaching involves the phrase, "Don't smile before Christmas." For those of you who aren't up on your teacher lingo, this translates to "Be strict at first because it's always easier to lighten up than it is to gain back some control." This is a ridiculous thing to tell first-year teachers. They don't (or at least, I didn't) have any way of knowing how strict is too strict/ not strict enough. I was a "good kid" in high school. I didn't get into trouble. I never had a teacher have to call home. I never even got detention. So, I don't completely understand what to do or say to kids who aren't like that. My experience gives me no precedence to follow.

What I have learned is exactly what Shakespeare is talking about: if you catch problems early, they can be "quickly trodden out." I've also learned that by cutting the learning into smaller and smaller pieces, students are less likely to become frustrated or bored. So they do their work and cause minimal problems.