You know that game at the arcade, whack-a-mole? The one where you try as hard as you can to hit the little animals as they come up out of their holes? And you are frantically trying to anticipate where the next mole will come up? You have a great big mallet and a limited amount of time to hit as many moles as you can. Some days at school, I feel like I'm playing whack-a-mole all day long (without the mallet of course).
This is what I'm talking about. All of my students have the need for adult attention. They seem to crave it. They will do anything to get the attention they need. Positive or negative, they will get the attention they want. So as a teacher I try really hard to give them positive attention and teach them patience when they can't get it immediately. I really try to keep from acknowledging the behaviors that lead to negative attention. Some days it is really a struggle to keep things positive.
One day last week, it was really difficult to keep up the positive attitude in my room. It seemed like as soon as I started working with one student, someone else would start with the behaviors that normally get them in trouble. As soon as I shifted my attention to the newest outburst and got that settled, someone else would pop off.
It was so frustrating. I knew that I wasn't making the situation better because I was feeding the negative behavior with attention. I was helping the situation continue each time I stopped teaching to deal with the behavior. And the behaviors that were occurring weren't horrible, they weren't harmful to the student or even to stuff in my room. They were just annoying. Little stuff like being out of their area, talking out, not working, tattling on each other, etc.
So at the end of the day, I was exhausted. I didn't get any teaching done, and the kids and I were crabby. I went home and had one of those really long moments of self reflection where I beat myself up and then try to make a new plan. How do I stop the whack-a-mole cycle? How do I keep from feeding that negative attention monster? The more I thought about it, the more I became convinced that I am going to have to put teaching academics second right now to teaching behavior management. As frustrating as that is going to be... I think it's the only way to keep the whack-a-mole from starting.
The next time this starts, I am going to stop paying attention to the little behaviors, even if they are annoying. It will be difficult and might feel chaotic for a while. I think I can do it, if I can stand that the behaviors will escalate before it gets better. I know this will be a good thing in the long run.
So think of me while I throw out the mallet, and embrace each of those moles as they pop up their ugly little heads.
Since I can imagine any number of annoying behaviours attributable to a particular student of yours, I will tell you that over the years, I find myself doing just what you are going to try. There's a lot of behaviours I choose to let go. (Too much, Ryan might say. Bwahh.) I'm with you. You choose your battles, and I think wartime strategists (hey, I've played Risk!)tend to plan a bigger offensive attack on the countries that matter more than others. Needless to say, Chaos is running rampant in our home, but not as many toys are being used as projectile weapons these days. Maybe it's working?
ReplyDeleteRemember when we were kids and mom would take us to the chucky cheese place across town and we would all go to the whack-a-mole game? we would all play at the same time so each of us had a mole to ourselves and we would get so many ticketS! totally cheating of course. too bad you can't have a teacher for every mole in your classroom. you are going to have to fly this one solo. not as many tickets, but in the end it will be just as rewarding.
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