That's a big deal for kids, when they come into the kitchen and the teacher is drinking coffee with mom. They react differently on the next day when you say: 'Sit down and shut-up!'
I've come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element in the classroom. It's my personal approach that creates the climate. It's my daily mood that makes the weather. As a teacher, I possess tremendous power to make a student's life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration. I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations it is my response that decides whether a crisis will be escalated or de-escalated and a student humanized or de-humanized.
I've just started school again, and it was a bit strange to start off with; it took me three or four days to get used to it. My friends have been great, they've been treating me normally.
Shall I describe the happiness it gave me to go into the classroom and pick up the chalk? ... It seemed to me the supreme, heartbreaking happiness to enter a classroom carrying a register as that bell rang, and start a lesson with the mysterious air of one about to unfold wonders.
You really have to be a good entertainer, or the show won't work. For me, it was all about having fun with the audience, which meant that I could usually forget that the camera was there. It was kind of like being in the classroom.
Tuesday—we had school for the first time. Madame O’Malley had a moment of silence at the beginning of French class, a class that was always punctuated with long moments of silence, and then asked us how we were feeling. “Awful,” a girl said. “En français,” Madame O’Malley replied. “En français.
I think the Americans need to understand that a lot of times the children are bored in school, and that is why they are not staying in.
Sometimes I loved the disruptive student in class who livened up lectures with wisecracks - it put a spin on things, added flavor, made me laugh. Other times, I wished the heckler would just shut up so I could learn something.
If you have a class of 35 children, and they're all smiling, and there's one little bastard, and he's just staring at you as if to say 'Show me', then he's the one you think about going home on the train.
I find teaching - I like it, but I find just walking into the classroom and facing the students very difficult.
After my first year of college, each course I took in every field was so boring that I didn't even go to the classes.
If the attitude of the teacher toward the material is positive, enthusiastic, committed and excited, the students get that. If the teacher is bored, students get that and they get bored, quickly, instinctively.
The teaching fellow establishes the atmosphere of a class in the first few meetings. I have found that students appreciate having the ground rules clearly defined from the start.
