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Mar
7
Sometimes motivating students is as easy as asking a question.
Filed Under "At-risk" students, Behaviour Management, underachieving students | 1 Comment
Sometimes nothing I do seems to work with some students. There are some students that I just can’t reach. I always feel badly about that. Larry found himself in the same position a couple of weeks ago but came up with an ingenious strategy that seems to be working. He simply asked his student “Are you going to have a good day” and the student did. In fact, the student has had several good days. It was as simple as that. Who knew.
Larry says “I think the personal contact and helping him get into the mindset that he can make a choice are two reasons why it’s worked so far”. Makes sense to me. I know that personal contact can make a difference. I work hard to develop a relationship with my students and making students aware of the fact that they have an option of having a good day or not may make the difference. I’m certainly going to try Larry’s strategy. In fact, I’m going to try it tomorrow morning. I’ll let you know how it going. If you give it a try, please let me know how it goes.
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28
Understanding girls bullying girls
Filed Under Bullying, The way I see it, maintaining a safe, positive climate | Leave a Comment
I believe our task is to give every girl, every parent, and every teacher a shared , public language to address girls’ conflicts and relationships. A world that acknowledges the hidden culture of girls’ aggression would empowers girls not only to negotiate conflict, but to define relationships in new healthier ways. (Rachel Simmins, p.261)
I’ve accepted the challenge of doing what I can using my blog to help give a shared, public language to address the issue of girls bullying girls. Often girls bullying girls isn’t taken seriously at all. There isn’t a good general understanding about the issue of relational aggression, the form of bullying most common with girls.
I came across this video that helps begin to explain the phenomenon of girls bullying girls and want to share it with you. I found it amazing to think that 5% of girls skip school on any given day because they’ve been bullied. Come to think of it though, I’ve had students like that. They were bullied in school and stopped coming to class or even to school to the point where social workers and counseling had to get involved to try to get to the bottom of the issue and give support to the victim as well as the bully. Both the victim and the bully need our support.
If you know of any other resources that would be useful, please leave the link as a comment. We need to get the word out.
Reference
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Simmons, Rachel. (2002) Odd Girl Out Orlando:Harcourt,Inc.
.Feb
16
A student is trying to bully me.
Filed Under Behaviour Management, Bullying | 5 Comments
Yes, it’s happening again. One of my students is trying to bully me. Janet, not her real name, tried to bully me to get her way. I asked her to do something last class that she really didn’t want to do, ( using her ear buds to listen to her music while working on her project) and she said ” having to use ear buds to listen to music is going to really p*ss me off”.
That’s a threat and that’s a form of bullying. Janet’s trying to get her way by threatening me. The implication is that I don’t want to get her mad because … so I’d better let her do what she wants to do. She’s obviously learned this tactic somewhere. Kids like Janet who try to bully teachers by threatening to get mad need to be told that threatening to get mad is a form of bullying and that tactic needs to stop. Bully is not an acceptable behaviour. Period. If she does it again, I will take the threat to administration. She needs to know that what she does is a form of bullying and that bullying is unacceptable.
Other articles about bullying
Stopping bullying in my classroom
Bullying is a cry for help we’d better listen
Cyberbullying Part 1- relational aggression
Students with learning disabilities or ADHD are more at risk of being bullied
Cyber-bullying- educationing kids is better than incarcerating them
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13
Stopping bullying in my classroom
Filed Under "At-risk" students, Bullying, positive climate | Leave a Comment
I work hard to create an inviting classroom where my students can feel safe. The first two weeks of the new semester presented all kinds of challenges. I had a student who tried to bully me by threatening to get angry if I didn’t let her do what she wanted. (I talked about that in my last post.) I also had a student try to bully another classmate by telling her to get out of her seat or she’d smack her in the side of her head and then later tell yet another classmate to stop looking at her or she’d throw her cell phone at her.
When I talked to Sam, not her real name, in the hall about the inappropriateness of what she was doing, she told me that telling the student to move or she’d smack her in the side of her head was her way of saying please. Obviously, I got administration involved, and Sam was removed from my class.
Sam needs to stop her bullying behaviour. There’s no doubt about that. She needs help. We have an anti-bullying policy at our school and are committed to providing a positive climate for learning so Sam will definitely get the message that her bullying behaviour is not acceptable. I’ve made it clear that I want my classroom to be a safe place for all of my students and any behaviour that threatens that is not acceptable and has to stop.
I just want to add here that Sam’s just a kid and has learned this behaviour somewhere. Both the victim and the bully need our support.The school system along with the other adults in her life need to help Sam learn more appropriate ways to deal with her anger and get her needs met. She cannot continue to threaten to hurt people to get her way. Next week, I hope to find out how that is going to be done.
Some other posts about bullying
Bullying is a cry for help we’d better listen
Cyberbullying Part 1- relational aggression
Students with learning disabilities or ADHD are more at risk of being bullied
Cyber-bullying- educationing kids is better than incarcerating them
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