Cue the Lightbulb

It seems like when people ask me about how teaching is, I usually bring up classroom management. Classroom management was one of the most difficult things about my first year of teaching. Now, trying to get ready for next school year, I've been reading a book about Love and Logic techniques and Fires in the Middle School Bathroom and trying to fine-tune my classroom rules and procedures.

With all my research, though, still I've been baffled by the secondary student mentality of misbehaving and how (my books tell me) it's often motivated by getting something or avoiding something, which might include manipulating others. Honestly, the more I work with junior high and high school students, the more I realize how I wasn't very typical at that age at all. I never got in trouble at either school, and I can only remember two instances of correction at home during those times. All through school, I would just go to class, sit down and listen, and expect that everyone else was going to do the same.

This is why I can't even understand why students act out in class. So, with the books I've been reading and the recorded seminars I've been listening to, I've been trying to imagine what it's like to be an adolescent. And it's like learning a foreign language, or trying to fit into a foreign culture. I can learn about it and read about it, but I can't speak without an accent, and I can't help but stick out on a subway in Seoul.

I just don't get it. Or I didn't until yesterday.

I've been taking Spanish classes while I'm here. I'm in the advanced class (a nice ego boost), and the teacher has been good at getting me to improve some of the gaps in my Spanish--mistakes I make over and over, grammar I never quite learned, etc. One of her primary methods of teaching is stopping us (me and one or two other students in the class, usually) when we're speaking and we make a mistake.

This has done a couple of things for me. First, like I said, it's helped me improve my Spanish. Also, it has taught me that I could be a little less...soft about feedback in the classes I teach. That is one thing I want to change about my own teaching.

I don't think I want to do it quite as often as she does, though--the technique has also had a few other results. For one thing, since I've been here, my Spanish has become a lot more slow and hesitant (in any situation, not just in class). I also sometimes get frustrated in class and don't want to say anything so that I don't keep making mistakes and getting corrected.

Well, on Friday, we read Gabriel Garcia Marquez' short story I Sell My Dreams.* The teacher wanted us to summarize the story. This activity started off well, but then began to deteriorate. In addition to all our linguistic mistakes that needed correction, we weren't summarizing with all the detail she liked. So she began to ask very specific questions to help us. I remembered the plot of the story well, but I couldn't always remember who looked at who or who said what when and why. Our answers were getting worse, and she was getting frustrated with us, sometimes adding a bit of agitation into her questions and comments.

And that was the moment I understood my students.


Since I was getting questioned and corrected and snapped at with anything I said, I didn't want to answer any of her questions any more. So when she asked me, I would give the shortest answer that I could, which would irritate her. If I didn't remember the answer (which I often didn't), I would kind of hum that I didn't know and page slowly through my story "looking" for it. I did this knowing that this would just make her more agitated (which was fine with me, since I was a bit mad at her) and that it would drag out the activity longer and longer and we wouldn't have to do anything else with the story. 

I realized, finally, that this is what all those books were talking about! I didn't get this idea of manipulation/misbehavior-to-get-what-you-want until that moment. It amazed me how simple it was: I didn't answer --> she got more agitated and the activity lasted longer. I feel like I am more a part of our human family now that I understand this. Thank you, Spanish teacher. Thank you.





*I've read a few things by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and I'm pretty much in love with his writing. If you don't know about him...well, you should. He's Colombian. He wrote 100 Years of Solitude, which got him the Nobel Prize. He is famous for his use of magical realism--stories about regular people in realistic settings, except that all of a sudden something happens like a magic carpet flying through someone's living room, and no one finds it strange. He has some neat short stories, like the one linked above. I think it would be worth your time to check them out.