36. Creative discipline
Any veteran teacher will tell you that there is nothing like experience when it comes to effective classroom discipline. We all wish we could have some of our first groups of students back knowing what I know now. There is nothing like experience.
When it comes to discipline, I believe any disciplinary action must accomplish thee objectives; inconvenience the student, be relevant to the behavior, and deter repeat offenses. The result is more learning time (although not initially). Detentions, in school and out of school suspensions are often necessary because they give the parties involved the time to “cool down”, but they don’t achieve my two objectives listed above. At least detentions (especially Saturday) inconvenience the student but the relevance is missing. Any teacher that must supervise a detention of any sort knows it is not a deterrent either by the simple fact that it is the same students day after day.
Sometimes it is quite simple to implement creative discipline. You make a mess you clean it up, if you use foul language than you will find five other words in the dictionary to use in its place, if you’re rude to a guest than you will write him/her a letter of apology. You get the picture. One time I actually had it setup with the father of a student that they would come in and sit with him, if there was another problem. The warning was sufficient enough.
Other times it takes some time to implement creative discipline. I always seemed to have study hall duty and had a difficult time keeping students quiet. Of course I went through the usual avenues of write-ups and detentions, but I had repeat offenders. I also would communicate with teachers in regards to what assignments students in my study hall should be doing but that takes time. Students know their assignments but often choose not to do them. So instead of constantly trying to persuade them to do their work, I give them a simple choice. They either keep busy with their work or I give them an assignment to do. I titled my assignment The perfect assignment for the student who has nothing to do. It entails copying 26 words of their choice and their definitions from a dictionary (one word per letter of the alphabet). If it is not completed during study hall, than I accept it the next day of school. I have copies already printed out and the wonderful thing about this assignment is that it can be given every day and never have the same answers!
Remarkably, students very rarely come to my studyhall with nothing to do. They now remember the assignments that I used to have to remind them of.
