Getting through.

It turns out that there is a delicate balance when addressing misbehavior. Too much either way could be disasterous. I held a couple of students after school today. It was typical misbehavior (talking, disrespect, headphones, hand puppeting in the projector light with repeated requests to stop) and both students had been held after before. One of them was yesterday even. I'm generally still pretty upset if I call them out during class. If I have them wait after class, I've had a chance to cool down. If I'm too upset while I'm talking I can literally watch them shut down. No will is stronger than a teenager will that thinks it's been wronged. The balance is in the understanding/encouraging/c'mon-dude-what-are-you-doing-to-yourself/I-want-to-be-fair tone that I use. You have to have all of that plus the serious commanding of respect necessary to get anything to change. It's all very exhausting.

Today I totally lost the first one. He just kept on asking if he could go yet every time I asked him a question. That's irritating. He didn't think I was being fair at all. Finally I told him that if he wouldn't talk to me I would call his parents for a conference. That scared him but I didn't give him a do-over. I still had another kid to deal with. I almost lost her. I toned it back just at the right moment to help her see (or at least admit to it whether or not she believed it) that it's necessary to change her behavior. All we can do is wait and see what happens.