Sorry that yesterday's episode of You Don't Scare Me, I Teach Middle School! was canceled due to ice storm coverage. (Or, in other words, my internet access was cut short due to the cable being out. It came back on about 1/2 hour before class.)
Something to ponder and reflect on today: do we give our students the answer far too often? I overheard this in a discussion between two teachers, and picked up on it. At first I wasn't sure what they meant, but after questioning them, I got their drift, and it got me to thinking. What they meant was, when handed a paper, do you make corrections for grammar, spelling, etc.? If you hand the paper back to the child, you just get the same thing back with your corrections on it. The student did not learn, or search, for the correct answer. Now, I remember getting papers back like this, and I did learn from them, but I believe that I, or my peers, were more intrinsically motivated than today's student. I didn't want to make the same error again, whereas, with today's student, you just get the same errors on the next paper. It is food for thought in my humble opinion.
L&L speaks to classroom management and behavior quite well, and as a teacher, you are the ruler of your little kingdom, so to speak. However, I would like to poll my classmates, and ask them this: despite your own efforts at classroom behavior, do you think that you sometimes inherit a behavior from another teacher or class? Do your kids come to the room from another classroom, run differently from yours, and find themselves having to "shift gears" in their behavior to meet your standards? This is a difficulty I faced last year when I inherited a room from a teacher who did nothing to run an orderly classroom. By the time I got there, the kids were used to that room being their unofficial "recess". Other teachers had told me that they dreaded getting these students from this teacher because it took most of their own class period to get the damage done the period before under control.
Thinking of this reminds me of another aspect I have discussed with my wife and other teachers. While we may use L&L in our own way in our classroom, we only have them for seven hours or so a day. What happens to our children when they get home? What is their homelife like? Their neighborhood? I have seen teachers work like mad dogs all day long to shape good behavior out of student through love, caring, and being tough (in a concerned, caring way) when they needed to. By the time same student spends an hour or so at home, or in their neighborhood, all that good work is undone, and the process starts all over again the next day. This is exhausting to a teacher mentally, physically, and spiritually. We, as teachers, can do nothing about drugs, family violence, lack of respect, etc. I guess there is not solution.