neverland in perpetuity

when do you start to learn responsibility?

i honestly don’t remember. i hate to say it, but i think i’m finally becoming an adult. or perhaps it’s been happening now for a while, and i’ve been unaware.

seriously... i always thought -- or at least i truly hoped -- that i would never become an adult. that i would get older -- yes. that i would learn things that adults learn -- yes. that i would live an adult life -- yes. but i’m not sure that i ever really believed that i would grow up.

that’s not to say that i have -- or that i ever will -- grow up.

what i mean to say is i never really expected to forget what it’s like to be a child. again... not what it’s like to play like a child, act like a child or behave like a child (in some respects, i think i do that better than a lot of kids half my age...), but rather what it’s like to reason as a child.

like understanding responsibility. when do you do that? when does that click in your head? i honestly can’t say that i remember.

granted... i’m a bit different when it comes to things of that nature. (perhaps i’m wrong... you’d have to ask my mother to verify this... but i think i’ve always been a very well behaved child, relative to other children my respective age -- writing papers, book reports and the like aside.) i think i’ve usually caught on to things of this nature a bit faster than others. but still. shouldn’t a child of 11 or 12 years have a decent grasp on the concept of responsibility for their actions?

the thing that brings this up:

today i was with half of the worst class that i teach, in regards to behavior -- and i was with the better half of them. they were acting like a bunch of chimpanzees out on a play date. i couldn’t get them to shut up for more than 30 seconds at a time.

there was for certain one student paying attention... and the others would pop in and out, so that at any given moment i had roughly half of the class with me. i consider that a good thing with this class... so i kept teaching.

over the course of the next 5 minutes, i went from an average of half the class to the one girl paying attention. in the past, at times like this, i stop and i wait. i wait for the class to figure out that i’ve stopped... and to get each other to quiet down.

i’d already done that several times today.

i had two kids that just walked out into the hall because they were tired of the noise, and the headache it was giving them. i tried to reason with them (who are often two of the more noisy ones in this group...) that they could do their part by a) being quiet and b) inciting the others to do they same. they assured me they had tried, but in vain.

so i had an idea.

i had everyone get back into the room, and into their seats, and made one final attempt to quiet them the habitual way. this, as i assumed it would, failed. so i went to the board and started to write something. they figured something was up... but weren’t quite sure what it was... so they hushed a bit, in case it was important, menacing or entertaining. if it was just more lesson, i don’t think they would have cared.

i wrote: silence

i told them: there are enough dictionaries in the back... everyone go and grab one. (i would have assumed at this point they had figured out what was going to happen... but i don’t think most of them understood until AFTER i had explained what was happening... which was after i wrote what they were supposed to do on the board. sometimes they’re really slow...)

i underlined silence and wrote beneath: take out your scratch paper notebook

and then: copy the definition 3x

i had noticed already that the two kinds of dictionaries had different lengths of definition. the one was about four times as long as the other. and one girl (the good one) had gotten a dictionary out of her desk. (her definition was really short...)

they all groaned and complained. especially when the ones that hadn’t totally understood what i wrote (even though it was in french...) figured out they had to do it 3 times. the ones with the bigger definitions in particular were unpleased. “sorry... that’s the way it goes. stick with the dictionary you picked.”

and i made them do it in... silence.

they had a hard time with that. they don’t like silence.

when there were about 10 minutes left, i had them stop. some had finished... most no. i asked them, “what is silence?” they read me their definitions. “what do you like better: learning english, or learning definitions?” it was the first one.

and i made up a new thing with them. from now on, whenever i esteem they are being too noisy or disruptive or inattentive... i start spelling a word in the corner of the board. i can put down one letter... or two. depending on how i’m feeling, and how big of a pain they’re being. once they word is fully spelled out... we stop. they get a dictionary. and i tell them how many times they have to copy the definition.

i think in the future, i’ll make them finish it. probably not the whole thing in class... a bit, but not all. the rest, they’ll have to finish and turn it in to me for the next class period. and if they don’t... more problems will have to come up.

i hate doing this. i hate punishments.

i don’t like getting them... and i don’t like giving them.

why can’t they just grow up?