I switched my stance on detentions after that experience. Now, when I get a new batch of students who are trying to learn me, I often get the question, “Mr. Morris, do you give detentions.” My response, “Heck no, why would I want to spend any more time around you kids than I have to.” In most teacher to student interactions, I find that a dash of sarcasm mixed with a pinch of reverse psychology goes down very smoothly. But in all honesty, I simply just don’t understand the true purpose of given a student or a class a detention. 

Giving a detention is like sending a kid to the office. In regards to the latter, there are situations in which you may pull that trigger and hit that intercom and let that kid know that they have now just played themselves; a kid swearing at you or a kid doing something so incomprehensibly stupid in the presence of other students and yourself that there is no way that you can immediately correct it in that moment. Those are the two times you may consider sending a kid to the office. Those are the two times when a kid needs some one-on-one reflection time, and perhaps a short lesson on consequences, with an administrator. But detentions… what is the purpose of them?

Is it to correct behaviour that occurs during instructional time? If so, then why don’t you do that, um I don’t know, during the instructional time? If you don’t jive with what is going on in your classroom while you are teaching, stop your lesson, stare at the student or students who are disrupting learning, and address it then. I tell my three-year-old niece “use your words” when she tries to act like she doesn’t know English. Teachers, you are adults, you can do the same. 

The more egalitarian thinking leads me to believe that this zeitgeist of “modern” day schooling derives from some teachers believing that a detention is a method of showing students that there are consequences for actions. And that is a fair way to look at it, especially if you think that your role as a teacher is aligned with the idea that you are the omniscient one, at all times, in the classroom. Giving detentions based on that rationale, at the least, makes sense. Albeit, it is a flawed way of thinking that also indicates you have a saviour complex. I don’t know, maybe I’m just a self-described passionate educator who fumes at the sight of seeing a bunch of kids walk out of a classroom in silence, all sour-faced, twenty to forty minutes after the school day is over. School is supposed to be a fun place. It’s supposed to be engaging. At the end of the day, kids should leave the building happy and want to come back tomorrow. They should be in love with the idea of education and learning, especially in elementary school.

Maybe I need to talk to some actual kids about this subject. Maybe my students will give me a better perspective on detentions. But what I do know, because I’ve seen it, is that the same teachers dish out the same detentions to the same kids and the same classes in September at the beginning of the school year and also in June, at the end of the school year. So… again I ask, what is the purpose of detentions?

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It seems like a simple enough concept in itself. As a teacher, you have to earn respect in order to get respect. It works in all walks of society so school is really no different. I’ve mentioned in the past that the one thing no teacher has to worry about is our students’ fundamental understanding that the adult standing in front of the room talking is the “teacher” and will subsequently have some sort of automatic leverage over students, but what I’ve learned over my years in the classroom is that “teacher” and “authority figure” are not synonymous.

It is a good thing that our society has become more critical as a whole. We openly question politicians and laws and norms. This societal mood has inevitably spilled into a culture of school children that question exactly why they are learning what they are learning and even the value of a post secondary degree. This is good. And as educators, and adults, we should be prepared to answer these questions to the best of our insights and experiences. But the flip side of this trend is that the reverence of “the teacher” is no longer tangible. Students openly questioning why they are getting math sheet after math sheet, day after day, is not dissent, it is critical thinking (ironically, “critical thinking” is one of the 21^st century skills we are trying to foster). Inappropriate behavior is a function of many things: student disengagement, immaturity, a schism between teaching styles and learning styles, and such. As teachers, we ought to investigate the triggers to that inappropriate behavior and attempt to alter it. This happens through communication with students, even if it means stopping a learning moment to engage in a life moment. We simply cannot say, “they did not do what I said” and write off a bunch of children as “bad seeds”. We get paid good money to do a whole lot more than that.

I am admittedly one of the worst elementary sports coaches I’ve ever seen in my life. Sports came naturally to me and I do not understand how to break down basketball or football or volleyball I.Q. to kids who simply “don’t get” sports as easily as I do. But I know this and constantly work to improve on my “teaching”, understanding that our poor performances are more on the fault of me as a coach than on them as student athletes. Some of us never acknowledge nor reflect upon this possibility in the classroom. There are math teachers walking around with two master’s degrees in the field that cannot teach 12-years-olds how to calculate the area of a trapezoid. And when the students either “don’t get” the math or aren’t interested in the lesson, these same teachers blame the students. Yo, they made mirrors for a reason.

You want respect – you’ve got to earn it. You want respect? You have to establish it. Respect is required in my classroom, but that is because I both implicitly, and when I have to, explicitly, make it a requirement. This ain’t 1950; students aren’t walking into schools wearing blazers and ties, sitting in rows, and walking through the hallways as a class in a single file line just because “that’s the way it is”. If you are not getting respect in your own classroom you may want to look at your own practice as a “teacher” and really examine the quotations around that word teacher before you start blaming kids for being the problem.

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Unfortunately, there are some educators who extend this logic into the classroom.

By a minute extension of practical logic, “to be feared” as the teacher make surface sense: I mean, we only have our students for ten months and then we are shipped a new batch after a two month break. But the fallacy in this educational pedagogy lies in the fact that we are more than “bosses” or “rulers” of our classrooms. We are supposed to be leaders in the most Utopian of senses: we nurture, guide, protect and care for the students we have from morning to early afternoon, Monday through Friday. We must demand…yes demand, accountability, action, agency and an academic standard in our classroom, but we must do this through love and not fear.

We can shout and scream, and shoot, if no one is looking, even break a yard stick over a desk to get attention and demand compliance. And yes, once we take those actions we will surely get the compliance we are looking for. But when we foster compliance through quote unquote fear, we are establishing an environment that lacks trust and compassion for the actual learning that we want to foster in our students. In the case of fear tactics, it may last a while, heck perhaps even the entire school year if we press and prod hard enough, but this approach will lead to half-developed individuals. Not something that I would want my child or yours to endure.

No student has ever come back, after graduating, to visit the teacher they “feared”. In fact, many a child has probably dreamt of the day they moved on from that class, matured into an adult, and ran into said “feared” teacher at the grocery store. I imagine a greeting like that would be far from amicable. But they do come back to visit the teacher they “loved”. So in a sense, love does go further than fear…at least in the teaching world. Thus, as teachers, we must operate within this framework while leading our students.

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As a 7^th grader, a bunch of boys from the 8^th grade surrounded me and my friends and…let’s just say we engaged in some “wrestling matches” in which there would clearly be one group that would win. Ten months later, I was on the fortunate end of these royal rumbles. Only difference was that no one told any teachers the year before. Apparently, what we were engaged in was called “hazing”, a big time no-no that educational institutions were working diligently towards eradicating. I was suspended for two days.

As a junior in high school, I would always look to skirt implicit rules. Let’s chalk those actions up to “passive resistance” and stay on track here. One day, I passed a teacher with my hat on. He told me to take it off. I did. 50 feet later, I put it back on. 150 feet later, I passed the same teacher. He walked me to the office where I was suspended for “opposition to authority”. Two days.

In the first instance, I should have been suspended. In high school, it would have pissed me off more if they confiscated my hat rather than send me home. Actually, before I “immediately exited the property” I went to all my teachers to let them know I had been suspended for wearing a damn hat (of course, I had to make that point) and asked for any work I would miss. I probably got some work packaged for me in middle school, but all I can really remember about that scenario was the look in my father’s eyes when I got home and the color of the belt he was wearing that evening.

Today’s students must navigate our obvious and traditional school discipline measures. Obvious stuff, no disrespecting teachers, no doing dumb things that you clearly knew were dumb. Beyond that, there is so much grey. While I didn’t know what “hazing” was, I knew that ganging up on a younger kid may come with some negative ramifications if “caught”. It is where we deal with the grey that becomes complicated. Ultimately, it becomes a judgment on what we value more: students learning the curriculum or students learning the “rules”. And by rules, I loosely connect it to rules of life. It is important for education to foster responsible citizens. If we can agree on that, I don’t understand how suspending a 17-year-old for wearing a hat conveys this learning point.

Lastly, we know that student time in class correlates with learning. What we do not know is exactly how student discipline correlates with said student learning that lesson. This blog will be too short to come to a concise opinion. That is for a reason. But for me: I drive the speed limit because I’ve “learned” that my insurance will go up if I get “caught”, not because of anything else.

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I was never a big yeller to begin with. It is not my personality. But somewhere after my first year of teaching and before my sixth, I found myself with the dulled weapon of the megaphone on my classroom management tool belt. For a minute there, I actually thought that it was in good practice to fire off that low base with the volume turned all the way up at some point before November. You know, give kids a glimpse of the entire arsenal just in case they ever thought of really testing that thin line of teacher-student harmony. But for some reason, that weapon has been left on the shelf. And hopefully it will remain there forever.

Your teaching style is a parallel reflection of your personality. I was raised by a mother who yelled at me regardless of the gravity of the dispute. Whether I broke a neighbor’s window or stared into the fridge for too long, I was catching her high-pitched fury either way. The net result begot a kid who would withdraw into indifference whenever someone began to raise their voice at him. Might as well have been speaking Chinese (I know, Chinese is not a language but that makes the point even richer in my opinion damn it!) By age ten, yelling became devoid of any rational message for me. Naturally, as an adult and eventually a teacher, I really didn’t see any use for it. But sometimes, man…those kids…you fire off on natural instinct!

This year has been different. Perhaps it is because I have changed schools. I have mentioned this before, but school culture has a major impact on individual pedagogy. If I am around a bunch of teachers whose first inclination on how to handle a student who is disruptive in class is to yell at them, over the course of a few years, I am going to begin to appropriate that “teaching style” into my own. It is inevitable. Maybe it is because I am teaching a different grade and older students. I used to give out candy at the end of the week to the group of students in my class who most consistently came in from transitions (recess, French class, etc.) and promptly got to work. We had a “group points” board and that thing worked miracles. But that was fourth graders. You can’t trick seventh graders into behaving. Well, actually you still can, but you don’t need to. But maybe I didn’t need the candy for the fourth graders? And on the opposite end, maybe I didn’t need to yell at them in order to get them to work appropriately either.

I think what shifted is simply a maturity in my pedagogy. It is an understanding that yelling at students is futile. My mother yelled at me and I still loved and respected her more than anyone on the planet. But, to put it simply, the yelling just didn’t work. Things are a little bit different for a teacher with her students. There is no unconditional love but there is rapport, compassion, and care. And out of those important levers that we use to drive student learning, nowhere in there do we need to yell at students. If you built rapport off of authentic compassion and care, the “yelling at students to get them to do what you want” is rather futile. Mr. Williams, a colleague of mine, sums it up more succinctly when he says, “reason and guilt is how I get down.”

Maybe I am omitting a few facts. In a brief conversation, another colleague put it like this, “I am a male. I’m tall. I’m Black. I have a deep voice…for those reasons, I don’t yell.” Perhaps being a male and teaching at the elementary level allots me a contextual privilege that some may not have. Paul added, “I tell them I believe in them and fight for them. So when they don’t represent well, it’s disappointing. A few words or even a stare can communicate that better than yelling.” He is right. Regardless of gender, race, or classroom dynamics, yelling really has no use in school. So, don’t do it! Save it for your pets.

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This is where the dichotomy between classroom management and student engagement comes in. Many feel that when students are quiet, listening attentively, and subsequently scribbling away with their lips sealed and their eyes glued to their papers, that they are engaged. I “behaved” like this in university while studying for exams. But I would contend that what I was not doing was learning, it was merely preparing to regurgitate. Ask me now to comment ad nauseam about any topic from my 300 level History of France in the Pre-Modern Times course…I might be able to get out a few names, and that’s at the most! I also behaved during silent reading times in elementary school when my teachers told me that non-fiction (for the largest extent pertaining to me, sports books) were not “good reading choices” and urged me to pick up short stories about fairies and spaceships. “See, this has a plot, Matthew. It has developing characters and a conflict. This is what you need to be reading.” So, I sat there and was engaged by conservative measures. Simply meaning, I sat there quietly and stared at my book. Many a day went by during silent reading time where I picked up these “good books” and daydreamed while staring at the same paragraph for 30 minutes. To the teacher’s eye, it was great classroom management. See, everyone is reading quietly and into their books. For me, I would have rather tested out how far I could plunge a fork into my eye before I went blind.

Perhaps you could argue that the whole reading issue and gender politics surrounding elementary language arts is a completely different topic (In fact, I would if I were you!). That is neither here nor there. My small point is that what we consider student engagement often masquerades as simply classroom management. Students are quiet during tests because a portion of their academic-selves are engaged. But the other portion knows that they have to be quiet. Students sometimes experience learning by being loud with their peers. That, to me, reflects engagement in a topic. I guess at the end of the day, as teacher, you need to find your balance and weigh equal parts engagement with management. The next question is…which one is more important?

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I know, technically the metaphor that is meant to encapsulate classroom management and student-teacher relationships is not supposed to be taken verbatim. But, even still, if the philosophy behind not smiling holds true, and you navigated the first few months by projecting a standoffish, impersonal, objective and robotic demeanor, I need to know how life in that classroom has been for you. Has firm compliance led to better, more productive, more diligent and engaged students? When veteran educators offered this axiom to me as a new teacher, I always thought that it was somewhat ironic. How can you pull someone into learning by pushing them away from you as the “lead learner”? To me, there is a difference between routinely establishing and re-establishing classroom expectations and “coming on hard” at the beginning of the year simply to make the job easier for you as teacher. When it comes to establishing a balanced student-teacher relationship, ultimately there is a fundamental difference between respect and its simpler form, compliance.

One of the (many) issues with education is that we have somehow slipped into this notion of belief that espouses compliance over relationships and engaged learning. Unfortunately, this compliance trend has affected principals, teachers, and ultimately students in their capacity to lead and to learn. I can’t sit here typing this and lie to you. It is great for me as a teacher when my class sits in complete silence while working through some math questions or a language activity because I explicitly established that expectation in the early weeks of the new school year. Even more troubling, is that I often fail to catch myself when I think that a quiet (the real meaning of compliance in the teacher setting, I guess) is the way that learning ought to be done every day. You know, no communication, every individual for themselves. But real learning cannot happen like this every day of the week. It shouldn’t. Real learning is about banter, spontaneity, challenges and challenging. And yes, real learning even involves breaks that take us back to the reality of acknowledging that we are all tangled in trying to help each other find our best selves. Not smiling sends the opposite message to your students. Real learning ultimately requires inquisitively challenging the norms. And, the “Don’t Smile Until November” mantra is one norm of schooling that must be constantly questioned.

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As a teacher, I am pretty candid with my students. Sometimes, I gather my class of fourth and fifth graders on the carpet and couch in my classroom and we grade assignments together. I hold up a student’s work, we highlight the positive aspects of it and then we talk about where it can use improvement. I wouldn’t recommend this for the first year teacher, but I think I have a pretty good grasp of the mentality of the junior learner and the things that push them towards excellence. And to be brutally honest, it makes my job a whole lot easier when I involve students in the assessment portion of their education. But with an open-style comes the opportunity of students challenging grades.

But being so candid comes with its negatives. Because I am really real with my students, I open myself up to a dialogue and relationship between students and myself that many teachers would feel uncomfortable with. My students constantly challenge their grades. I’m not talking about talking back but these kids don’t sit back and take that B- or C+ without objection. But I am secure in my pedagogy, so I not only expect this from my little 10-year-old students – I appreciate it.

As pertaining to the curriculum of my province in elementary school, I am obliged to teach different “writing styles”. Now, I am teaching my students how to write a procedure or an instruction. Versing my students in the language of fiction versus non-fiction is important. But I am a little confused as to why I have to spend a month teaching a strand of writing that basically consists of showing students how to write rudimentary “how-to” manuals. My students need to learn how to write a dang sentence! Let me refrain.

While I was teaching my students how to write procedural texts, like recipes and directions, and pedagogically implementing my community-based assessment strategies, a few students got upset that I was valuing neatness and organization over content. I am all about the “teachable moments”. These were mainly a few of the boys in the class voicing their complaints. I have no problem with students sharing an equal platform with me and challenging my decisions; whether it is 10-year-olds or undergrads (ironically enough, my 10-year-olds make more authentic and concise arguments than most undergraduate or post graduate students I have been around in recent years, see last post.)

The argument a few of my boys made about organization and “neatness” would be valid – if we were talking about an essay or paragraph response. But we were talking about a procedure. My kids were asked to write a simple recipe! Most wrote about how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich! This is where open communication between the student and the teacher comes in. I have established an environment that supports constructive criticism. If a student feels that something is wrong and unfair, they know to speak up. I don’t even care if they put their hand up at this point. My class is filled with 10-year-olds that operate and challenge thinking akin to a post-graduate classroom.

But this is where I feel most worthwhile. After a few of my students voiced their complaints of my tendency to validate organization over content, I took the opportunity to speak to them in a way that would educate them. I didn’t talk about content but about context – I explained that in a unit that is simply about writing down directions, the main gist of the learning pertains to format and overall appearance. Everybody knows how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. But who took the time to add the things we talked about in the lesson before – who added pictures, headings, an introduction, a diagram, and all that jazz and went the extra mile to actually demonstrate that they listened to my lesson and took what I said and applied it. And that is what they heard in my rant about organization and “neatness”. That is what they so courageously asked about and that is hopefully what I eloquently answered for them.

That is learning, it is not simply about a lesson and regurgitation, it is about a lesson, a product and classroom conversation and then a challenge. Through this experience of teaching, we will build students who actually understand a little better what their purpose for doing things are. I have no doubt that, after today, my boys will hand in their next “recipe” or procedural text with a little bit more neatness than the prior procedures they submitted. And that is all that I want. That is why I teach.

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I am not saying that you should let your classroom turn into a space where there are no rules. But turning every little instance where someone steps out of line into a big instance is not the main role of a teacher. Give students a little rope. I had a group of rowdy boys last year, so instead of turning every small issue into a big one, I used a form of progressive discipline that provided students the opportunity and agency to steer their behavior in an appropriate direction. These rambunctious boys operated on what I called the “5 strike system”: they had up to five instances of inappropriate behavior. This included things like distracting others from their work, leaving the room without permission, and not getting on task. On the 5^th strike, they no longer had the privilege of going to the mall for lunch on Friday. For the most part, it kept my boys in line. And it helped me because I no longer needed to micro-manage every issue. Sometimes a loose grip on the class works better than a tight one. If you let go of some of the micromanagement, I promise you will feel more balanced and energized.

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When June arrives it is truly a bitter sweet feeling. Way back in September, the prospect of June seemed so far in the distance that it almost felt unattainable. Now that it is here, it is almost a surreal moment. Everyone eagerly awaits the time we can all say school’s out for summer. As teachers we bask in the fact that, unlike most other jobs, we enjoy a two-month paid vacation right smack in the middle of summer. But real teachers do not teach for a lifetime simply for those two months every year. Those people do not survive in education, and if they do, they become hostile and bitter towards everything. The last few days of the school year are days to savor and days to grow, reflect, and learn.

At around “t-minus two weeks,” students are itching to hit the “checked-out” button. They know it’s the end of the year and it becomes a struggle to maintain constant accord throughout the school day. Almost systematic reminders are needed in order for students to remember that, despite the fact that we are in the home stretch, it is still not the last day. In the past, I used quasi “negative consequences” (I don’t want to call them threats) to stay on top of my students. The “there will be no class party if you’re going to behave like you’re already in party mode for the last two weeks straight, anyways” usually settles them down for a while. At the end of the year, don’t be the teacher who gives out a ton of busy work when you already know that your report cards are pretty much finalized. But you also don’t want to have such a free-flowing day that subsequently encourages students to check out. Find a balance between engaging learning activities and light fun.

The last week before school’s out are indeed draining ones simply from the constant class management that is required. While they are very consuming, they are also exciting times, especially for new teachers. Counterintuitively, the two hardest months of the year are those two months that seem like they should be the easiest: the first and the last. But when you think about it further, it really does make perfect sense. September and June are the two months that require the most classroom management implementation. September is about establishing classroom routines and June is about simply holding on to those classroom routines. Thus a constant presence has to be established in this last month. And other than the tediousness of report cards, maintaining a reign on twenty plus kids that are just bursting at the seams is the most draining part of the job! Geez, if we teachers did not have to grade work, write out lesson plans, and we did not have to worry about classroom management, life would be pretty sweet wouldn’t it?

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