Disorderlyness

I can’t help but notice how at the beginning of this school, all of us students were rather well behaved. The first week of lectures, we did a lot of drawing pictures, and creative projects. We’re thinking, “ok, we're learning about children at risk, so we learn to be child-like?”

10 weeks later, we have gotten pretty good at child-like behavior. As we’ve been learning about learning discipline, disabilities, and behavior disorders, we have also been conveniently exhibiting examples. It’s pretty bad when Rachel tells the speaker (her sister Michelle) to see us as her 5th grade class, because we have about that much of an attention span. It also doesn’t help that Michelle is teaching via Skype. Fortunately the internet isn't working, so we had to go to Scott and Leslie's house today for our Skype lecture. Getting out of the classroom, makes us slightly less antsy.

Michelle has been teaching us about the reasons kids act up, for: Attention, Power, Revenge, or Avoidance of Failure, and then how to deal with children based on the situation.

Now, when one of the guys, says “I can’t…” we say, “are you acting up to avoid failure?” So we get to apply what we are learning with our classmates, although maybe not how we would with the kids…

Michelle also gave us some links with resources for working with kids:
- A website: Tools For Teaching by Fred Jones, with group activities for us.
- A Book: Cooperative Learning by Spencer Kagan
- Another book: Grooming the next Generation for Success by Dani Johnson. One thing that book says is that the goal of discipline is to protect and empower, not to control. That's a really good point.

On Friday, as a nice outlet to our ADD, we got to role-play. 3 people acted as the teacher and teachers aids, and the rest of us got to be kids with special needs - ADD, Autism, Blind, etc…it was great fun acting up with our classmates tried to teach a lesson on “saying please.”


One thing I learned this week, and through last week's role-playing, is how to respond to kids who act up to get attention. I had thought ignoring them was the best way to deal with that, but then they just act up even more and try harder to get attention. Michelle said, one way to help those kids is to stand closer to them, and use their name in what you're talking about, "lets say John wanted Billy's toy." John starts listening because the story is about him. What a great technique...