Teachers are a hell of a lot more than baby sitters. Sadly, babysitting is unavoidably some small part of what we do. I had this visibly proven to me when flooding cut off too many roads: too many teachers were unexpectedly late, and, thanks to budget cuts, we didn’t have enough staff to monitor all the classrooms.
In principle, we could have consolidated students, since many buses arrived late, too. That causes a different kind of disruption, too, on more normal days, as students dribble in during the middle of lessons. But today was not a more normal day, and the staff was caught off guard.
Unsupervised, the students made trouble. We had several fights; I’m sure we’ll soon discover a fresh round of petty vandalism. Too many students to monitor drifted about the halls, either arriving by late bus or simply taking advantage of the chaos. The teachers couldn’t do hall monitor duty; they had to pin down their own classes and, when possible, try to keep an eye on the neighboring classroom. (Good luck with that!) The PA system called everyone into the gym before first period officially ended, just to help staff keep an eye on everyone, but it didn’t do much good: the bleachers hadn’t yet been pulled out, so visibility was poor, and the troublemakers just drifted off between class an gym, anyway. It was a real mess. My status as new, unproven teacher made it hard to pull authority, too.
To their credit, most of the kids just went along, no more desiring trouble than teachers did. Too many were happy to have class canceled, but I think a small majority would have preferred order and lessons to chaos. Unfortunately, a small percentage of bad actors can cause disruptions all out of proportion to their numbers. A bad day.
A day in which no teaching took place, and even precious little of the babysitting which is a prerequisite to effective teaching.
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