I was scared and unprepared for the outburst in room 14. But sometimes a little shake-up is just the trick for changing the course of a disaster in the making...It was early in the first month of my career as a High School English Teacher. I had one of those requisite first-year-teacher-classes overflowing with 35 "freshmen" - many of whom had made their own careers out of staying in that grade. I was 22 and had just graduated from 4 years of idyllic innocence in a Woman's College, oh,... and most of my students were boys.
It doesn't take a great leap of imagination to picture my first few weeks of teaching. To most of my students I was such a departure from what they were used to in the front of the classroom that I got away with a bit of a honeymoon period the first week - due almost entirely (I now think) to the fact that they wanted to see if this smiling, shiny-eyed, long-haired, quiet talking, overly enthusiastic lady was for real.
I don't recall teaching much in those first weeks. I think I mostly uttered the same phrases over and over and over again for 90 minutes (we were on a block schedule): Can I please have your attention? Shhhh! Excuse me. Can we quiet down? I need you to listen. Please stop talking. - and other variations on the theme.
None of this worked very well, and I remember feeling like I was spending every second of every day perched on just this side of complete chaos. And then, one day, we stepped to the other side.
Neka and Michael were the catalysts. Michael said something to her under his breath that certainly was not discernible to me above the general din in the room. Neka flipped out, threw over her desk, and started hitting him. He started hitting back. It was a classic scene from every first-year-teacher documentary. The rest of the class formed lines on either side of the brawl and started chanting "fight! fight! fight!"
And what was I doing in all this? Meekly saying "Stop! Please Stop!" Which worked about as well as all my other pleas in the previous days of class. Oh, and I was also crying. Which was a great addition to my overall effectiveness in the moment.
By now the noise had reached through the walls of my classroom and Ms. Nickens became my hero as she swept into the room and with a mighty boom of her giant voice silenced the masses and ceased the fight. She asked me to step outside as she gave the class a royal talking to. "I have heard you taking advantage of this teacher every day since the start of school and I am tired of it. She is here to help you learn and you are preventing her from doing her job. This is uncalled for and you should be ashamed. You would not do this in my class or Ms. Wilkins class or any of the other classrooms in this school. It is unacceptable for you to do it here. Ms. Fournel is too nice to you. You don't deserve it." And then the bell rang.
I still remember her words. But more importantly I remember the hug she gave me after all the students left. A big hug, one that held up the swiftly melting puddle I became.
"You've got to do something different in here tomorrow." She told me, stating the obvious. "What you have going on is not safe." I had never thought about it in those terms. I certainly felt disrespected by my students, ignored, scared, unimportant, but I never thought about the fact that my ineffectiveness was creating a dangerous situation for them.
The next day we started class with a journal assignment entitled: "What happened yesterday and what we need to do differently to make sure it doesn't happen again." After they wrote down their thoughts we talked about what they needed from me to make our class a place for learning and not for constant noise control. They were surprisingly forthcoming with ideas and turned out to be just as anxious for an end to the craziness as I was.
Things didn't turn around over night. We still had our rough patches. But years later when that class graduated more than one student came up to me and said, "We gave you a horrible first year, but you didn't give up on us."
And that, my friends, is the moral of this story.
