Dealing with Mrs. Lola’s class is a nightmare. The class appears to be unchallengeable when it comes to discipline. Therefore, you must be prepared to establish stern expectations right away or else risk the chaos of certain students who will begin to sense weakness within your character.
Yelling across the room, throwing pencils, ignoring your commands, and challenging you to the narrow edge just for laughs are conditions you are confronted with every day. If you do not address these disruptions right away and without reservation, you are in for a day of classroom chaos.
Insufficient Lesson Plans
The materials you receive to provide instructions are inadequate. If these materials are assigned to students, they will finish them in fifteen minutes, leaving forty-five minutes of downtime until the next lesson. Borden will prevail, and a classroom crisis will erupt.
Not matter how hard you attempt to teach, you will not be productive in getting your lessons across and students will not be able to learn. Disappointment will be the score. Your expectations for the least academic coverage is in jeopardy of not occurring.
Knowledge Acquired
You will discover that more than half of the class is unmanageable. The disturbance is so bad that no knowledge was acquired by students.
Personal Insights
To teach the class, a substitute must expect to deal with strong personalities who are set on giving you an extremely challenging time.
The Case for Change: The Team of Two
An unmanageable class is a disgrace to academic progress and must not go unaddressed. What must be done?
First, attitudes toward learning must be changed. Students must understand that there is nothing more important then obtaining a good education. This perception must be instilled in the student not only by the teacher but most importantly by the parent.
Second, parents must be heavily involved. There is no other way more effective than the sincere expression of concern by parents who desire to make a positive difference in a child’s life. When a child knows that a parent is passionate about what he learns in school, the child will perform more productively in the classroom.
Third, teachers and parents must become a team designed to transform the child’s behavior from chaos to academic harmony. Two important people in a child’s life are more powerful than dynamite, causing a positive explosion in personality and academic progress. As an avid regular and substitute teacher, I have seen this parent and teacher relationship work wonders time and time again.
Unmanageable classrooms across America must be addressed if the state of education is going to move toward a positive future. Policies must be designed to get parents more involved in their child’s education before the classroom in America become a place of knowledge and growth.
