I had a conversation with my nephew and, in between discussing the latest Drake vs. Pusha T beef, we talked about this topic. This idea was actually on my mind as I rode my bike home from the gym and passed a bunch of geese. I had never been afraid of geese in my life until I decided to waste time on Facebook the other day and watch a mindless video of them attacking humans. Nothing too graphic but it did look like their beaks gave one hell of a pinch if they caught you. Plus, they are big as shit. There were two geese about 12 feet from the sidewalk as I peddled by. They looked at me and I looked at them. They are friggin’ geese, but I was scared. I wondered if these feeble animals could smell my fear.

To a teacher, kids are powerless. Like geese, kids know that “fully evolved” humans rule their environment. But every now and then, kids, like geese, “beak up” and run an adult off a lawn. And in the classroom I’ve seen this on many occasions.

We don’t give these kids enough credit. They are evolving into actual real adult-like people, and if you don’t come correct, expect for them to deal with you in a way.

Simply walking into a classroom as a teacher and assuming that you are going to “manage” it merely because you are the adult in the room is your first mistake. Children are around adults all day and night, thus they have, at the least, rudimentary skills in negotiation tactics. And, despite not knowing what I thought as a 12-year-old, I do know that I didn’t ever enjoy doing math and science. I did it because I had to. And just like a good majority of society, people go to work every day because they have to. Just like “the real world” there are consequences for actions; the difference is, for students those consequences are rather inconsequential. In adulthood, them things get real.

But I do think that kids understand this. They have been told by either a teacher or a family member that school is preparation for the real world. And a large majority of kids probably take this sentiment “in” on some sense of a realistic continuum of understanding. But just like the day your boss isn’t in the office – these kids always take advantage of the supply teacher. And you can ask any supply teacher; they do it from third grade on. Reason why – they smell the weakness in the air.

I usually end these blogs with a conclusion that ties things together while providing some sense of direction for folks who are immersed in the game of education. But for this one, I really have no last words of wisdom. These thoughts are just tethered theories provided by geese on my ride home, a convo with my nephew and perhaps most importantly, witnessing teachers getting chewed up and spit out by collections of 13-year-olds and then having them ask people like me why it happened. My answer in a nutshell to the latter scenario is rather simple. These young kids are more adept than you think. And the one thing you should know about them is something we, as adults, have all forgotten. They are more genius, mature, and internal than we give them credit. As teachers, we seldom notice unless we are truly reflective in our practice and actually have adult-like conversations with our kids, starting with abstract questions like, “do you think kids can smell fear?”

[share title=”Share this Post” facebook=”true” twitter=”true” google_plus=”true”] 

The post Kids Can Smell Fear appeared first on Matthew R. Morris.

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.

[share title=”Share this Post” facebook=”true” twitter=”true” google_plus=”true”]

The post “Stop Doing That!” Aka, Yelling At Students appeared first on Matthew R. Morris.

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?

[share title=”Share this Post” facebook=”true” twitter=”true” google_plus=”true”]

The post Classroom Management and Student Engagement appeared first on Matthew R. Morris.

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.

[share title=”Share this Post” facebook=”true” twitter=”true” google_plus=”true”]

The post Don’t Smile Until November? appeared first on Matthew R. Morris.

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.

[share title=”Share this Post” facebook=”true” twitter=”true” google_plus=”true”]

The post How Not To Micromanage at School appeared first on Matthew R. Morris.

Some may never have this happen to them in their entire careers. Others may experience this many times through the course of dealing with particular students. There may be some protocol one ought to follow in a situation like this, but in the heat of this moment – no protocol can override the swell of emotions and instant reflex that you feel if it happens to you. What I am referring to are disrespectful students, like the ones that tell you to “f*** off.” I am writing about it because fortunately it happened to me in my very first year of teaching.

It was not an authority defying, “Yeah I’m looking straight at you and I just said ‘f off’ so why don’t you go f- off?” type of verbal assault. It was more of an almost under the breath, reflexive “f- off.” Either way, it was two words that a teacher never wants to hear uttered in their direction from one of their students.The “f- off” hit me immediately and with enormous impact. I was shocked and at a loss for words. It came to me as sharp and lethal as a hollow point bullet. First, nothingness occupied my mind and then a million thoughts came swirling in. There was the way that the ideal “Mr. Morris” should have handled it. There was the way that the real “Matthew Morris” wanted to retort. And then, when reality took its stand, there was the somewhere-in-between way that “Mr. Matthew Morris” did manage it.

This type of situation is hard to provide advice for. There are so many different contextual lines to unravel to understand how to, in a flash of a second, deal with such a volatile interaction. The “f**k off” is a situation involving the dynamics of power, contestation, and emotions among many other underlying contextual circumstances. Handling the situation also depends on your relationship with the student. Is it a troubled student? Someone who has a tendency to be off the cuff and show erratic and disrespectful behavior? Is it a student who has had a difficult day and simply reached a boiling point? Have you stepped into a situation that was already melting over and you are trying to serve some sort of damage control? All these contexts and many more come into play. These questions will affect how you will respond and follow up (with discipline).

In a supremely condensed version of the story, I requested her to do something and accompanied my comment with a remark that touched on the fact that other students had complained about the exact behavior she was currently performing. In retrospect, my accompanying remark may have been slightly hyperbolic and insulting to her. Perhaps feeling embarrassed and disrespected, she quickly retorted, “f**k off,” under her breath. And then the world stopped for a second. Did I really just hear that from a student directed at me? Woah.

I was stunned and felt like I had just been sucker punched. After a few seconds (but what seemed like minutes to me), I answered, “Excuse me?!… Are you kidding me?!” Followed promptly by, “You are going straight to the Principal; you can tell him exactly what you just said to me!!” I walked back into my room and buzzed the office. At this point, which was all in the matter of maybe ten seconds, the student was already crying and apologizing.

Being told to “f- off” by one of your students will definitely be something that you remember. Oddly enough, it is an experience that I wear with pride. After informing some of my colleagues of the incident, rather than feeling embarrassed (because I was a first year teacher and perhaps being told off by a student felt like it revealed some lack of classroom management and authority), I felt empowered like I had just earned some teaching medal of honor.

In the battlefield that is your classroom, when you get hit with something unexpectedly, you have to think quickly. Especially for new teachers, there can be occasions in the classroom that leave you flatfooted but that heat-seeking “F-Bomb” aimed directly at you cannot be one of them! If so, you run the risk of looking weak and not in control. Facing the “f**k off” is one more testament to the unforeseen situations that teachers face daily. Time and maturity will hopefully heal the fractured relationship that may occur after such an experience with a student. It is a reminder that even though we are teachers, we are human too. Catching an “F-Bomb” is an experience in facing that honest reality.

[share title=”Share this Post” facebook=”true” twitter=”true” google_plus=”true”]

The post Disrespectful Students, Emotional Outbursts appeared first on Matthew R. Morris.

An often over-looked and rarely talked about element of teaching is following through on things you promise to students. The classroom space is a battleground. Students are negotiating their limits and testing their boundaries with teachers at all times. Simply put, if you say you are going to do something, follow through! All teachers, but as new teachers especially, you must say what you mean and mean what you say. This sentiment extends to “negative reinforcements” and “positive rewards” equally. As a new teacher in the classroom your words are everything; what you say must go. And how closely your semantics are tied into your actions is key in how students will inevitably respond to you. Moreover, as a new teacher, students will be starving to know if you will actually follow through on the punishment you hastily dish out. If Sahil really does that one more time, will you follow through on what you “threatened”? Will you move his desk? Conversely, if all your students do ace the latest assignment, will you offer up a “homework free weekend” like you promised you would?

When you make “threats” or offer incentives, you have already signed the certificate of authenticity so my advice is: if you want to establish a rich currency in the age old bank account of relationship building, it is in your best interest to deposit your words and cash out when the time is right!

Students are going to listen and take every word you say to heart. That is why you must be so careful in what you say and deeply value the inherent integrity of your words. Not doing so will dilute your classroom leadership, management and impact. Again, our students are impressionable. To them, school represents a microcosm of life and the impact that school has on them is far greater than the impact school has on you. So your ability to say what you mean and mean what you say goes a long way in building relationships with your students.

For any teacher, especially for a new one, it is important to be an educator that can be counted on as being sincere to their word. It is also important for a teacher to be able to have his or her directives heard and understood clearly. It all gets back to teacher authentication (teacher talk b-link): every word that you utter must be wholly genuine. If you are finding trouble with this authentic control of your classroom because “being a teacher” is still unnatural and forced at your stage of comfort and professional development, then please use the words, phrases, questions and commands that are authentic to you (within the scope of professionalism, of course). Do what you believe is right and what you believe will work, not what the teacher in the classroom next door is doing. Ultimately, when you begin to do this, you will inevitably say what you mean, and mean what you say.

[share title=”Share this Post” facebook=”true” twitter=”true” google_plus=”true”]

The post Say what you mean and mean what you say appeared first on Matthew R. Morris.

As a new teacher, you will get all sorts of “advice” from teachers as to how to do your job. Mentorship and advice from teachers who have been in the profession for a long time is important and needed. But it all depends on how this advice is delivered. The first rule in advice for teachers is that no new teacher should be afraid to operate their classroom the way they want. I am a teacher who allows my students to carry on with a suitable amount of volume when working independently. Some days, I may reign it back and only except complete silence. Other times, I may allow them to talk and behave in a way that other teachers may consider a little bit too lax. But don’t confuse my classroom expectations with my classroom management. Your class is your own, period. Do with it as you may. Remember, you are their teacher, and they must respond to you. Ultimately they will respond best when they know and understand the true and authentic you. Don’t yell at your students if that is not your personality. There may be times when you may have to act a certain way to communicate a particular point. But a constant yeller is someone who has very little options in their classroom management “tool belt”. Take advice on strategies and techniques as needed. You are free to try out a few even. But understand that every teacher is different and every class is different. In the long run, you are going to come up with your own style, techniques, and methods of dealing with your students and managing your classroom.

There has been one valuable piece of advice I was given, subsequently tried, and since stuck with. And that is the model of being stern early on in the year and mellowing out later. It is much easier to start the school year a little more “rigid” and gradually tone it down. Being the “friend/teacher” early on and then eventually trying to “turn up” the sternness is a strategy that seldom works. Students are trying to negotiate their behavior with you on a daily basis. Everything they do, they say, they “get away with” is kept in mind – not just by the student who does it, but also by the 29 others that are watching. So in those first few weeks, set your personal expectations high; then you can gradually let your guard down.

One last thought on advice from teachers. Yes, “veterans” may have a lot of knowledge and lessons to give a new teacher. But remember what the new teacher has as well. A teacher of 15 years was giving me a laundry list of  “insights” into the adolescent mind. After rambling on for a while I reminded her that while her advice is built on years of experience and is valid, so is mine. She has been teaching adolescents for the last 15 years, but 15 years ago I was the exact age of those adolescents I now teach! So what I lacked in experience I gained in relevance and relateability. Never count yourself short just because you are new and others have been at the teaching thing for longer. The experience factor usually balances out. The sincerity of the unique daily experience is forgotten or dulled with most veteran teachers. This does not happen with the new teacher. Every student’s problem is cared for. Every tough question you receive is reflected upon when the day is over. The simply hailing of me as “Mr.” is refreshing. These feelings and moments will inevitably fade, but in this time, new teachers still have that advantage of authenticity and complete sincerity with their craft. Everything matters because it seems to matter. And although I am not condoning or denouncing one factor over the other, sometimes as a new teacher, what you lose in experience, you gain in authenticity. To the new teacher, everything is sincere still. So take the advice from teachers for what it’s worth. But inevitably, it all balances out.

[share title=”Share this Post” facebook=”true” twitter=”true” google_plus=”true”]

The post Some Advice on Teacher “Advice” appeared first on Matthew R. Morris.