Avoiding the Mid-Year Drift
I had a rather amusing revelation recently. It struck me that my classroom has seemed more peaceful and orderly in the past few weeks than what it did earlier. I wondered why this could be, because the natural tendency is for things to head in the opposite direction if I am not careful. I could not recall any extra effort on my part to keep my students quiet and focused. And then I laughed when I remembered the one thing I had changed: I outlawed slime a few weeks ago.
I may be a more permissive teacher than some, and in general I make very few rules about what students are or are not allowed to have at their desks. Some students are, in fact, able to focus better if they have something small to play with while listening in class. I have also seen countless fads come and go, so I am not quick to outlaw specific things. When slime became all the rage among my students near the beginning of the school year, I thought the craze would soon wear off. Unfortunately, it didn’t. I soon needed to put some limits on when students were allowed to play with it, but I did not ban it entirely. Students still played with it during story time and in various pockets of free time and when they finished all their assignments in study time. If someone had a big container of slime, other students wanted to borrow some, and so passing globs of it around became a distraction. Soon most students were spending all their spare time playing with slime instead of reading books and creating artwork. I knew the slime had to go.
When I realized how happy I was with my newly slime-free classroom, I was reminded of times when this has happened before, not specifically with slime, but with other objects or activities in the classroom that became a hindrance to learning. It is easy to allow a gradual slide into bad habits if I do not keep a constant effort to steer my ship in the right direction. Just because I started the school year with good procedures and routines does not mean I can sit back and let things drift into autopilot. It is my job to make adjustments when I see the need for them.
Making mid-year modifications to rules or routines can be difficult. We may have subconscious excuses: It’s too much work to enforce this. I don’t want to upset my students or take away something they enjoy. We’ll do better after all the excitement of Christmas. We’ll do better after our schedule stops being disrupted by snow days and delays. I write this as much for myself as for anyone, because know that I am proficient at making excuses like this, and I know that my classroom is a better place if I do not give in to those excuses.
I like to have little talks with my students now and then about how we are doing, prompting them to think of ways to adjust their habits and to make our classroom a better place for learning. Sometimes I am surprised at the things they point out. Together my students and I can renew our awareness and recognize ways we have become blind or indifferent to what we ought to be doing.
At the same time, we need to allow grace—for ourselves and for our students. We face realities of sickness, disrupted schedules, and various external factors over which we have no control. This year I repeatedly need to make peace with the fact that my classroom is often noisier than I would like it to be. I have many students in a small space, and my class contains some big personalities. While I do need to stand guard and not let noise hinder learning, becoming a control freak over this would serve no purpose. My expectations need to be realistic.
If you have been on the fence over whether to implement a new routine, ban a particular activity that has been bothering you, or establish better habits in your classroom, perhaps now is the time to do it. Each day you can take small steps to urge your students to excellence.
