Boundaries

So I guess writing every day is not going to happen. I'll keep the goal. Writing is a matter of habit.

I have it easy. Nineteen students, only two IEPs. I am aware that I might never again have it this good. This is my year to get my chops.

There was brief moment on Friday morning, the third day of school, when I dared to muse: Is this going to be too easy? Will I enjoy teaching if I don't have students threatening to kill me or themselves or at the very least tons of time when they should be working? My class seemed remarkably functional. Even Jeremy completed his first three assignments and participated in all of the activities. He drew puppet faces on his fists with a sharpee instead of reading during IR, but it could have been worse.

Then Friday afternoon came.

Friday is Chorus day. I am not sure why, but a solid majority of fifth graders hate Chorus. My class last year would dissolve in to a horde of anarchist preschoolers when it came time to transition to chorus. One of my students this year, we'll call him David, has harbored a particularly visceral aversion to the "Special." So on Friday when it came time to go to Chorus, David went to the bathroom. For an hour.

When I picked the class up from chorus they were a bit rough around the edges but more or less in tact. We were back in our room taking out our reading journals before I realized that David was missing. "Has anyone seen David?" Nope. No one had seen him. He most certainly had not been in Chorus. Crap. Day three and I've already lost a student.

I called the office and asked them to look for David. Two seconds later I heard footsteps coming down the stairs outside my classroom. Five seconds later I heard a page over the loud speaker, "David Smith, please return to your classroom. David Smith, return to your classroom immediately." The footsteps stopped abruptly. Double crap. If David was about to return to class, he sure wasn't going to now that he had been publically humiliated.

Over the next hour I tried to introduce my students to our writing workshop routines, review expectations for rough drafts, and evaluate their ability to write a topic sentence with supporting details, while coaxing David out of his major funk in the stairwell. At first he refused to enter the room. I jogged down the hall and asked for the principal's support. She got him to come in the room, where he sat at his desk with his head and arms pulled in to his shirt like a turtle in rush hour traffic. When the reading and writing blocks had passed and it was at last time for recess, he got up to go out with his peers. Not so fast. I reminded him that he had not completed the assignment and the consequence was to work during recess (this consequence had been established early on). When I told him he needed to go to the office to complete his work, I saw his true colors. Refusal, yelling, throwing papers. "I hate you!" "I hate school!" "I can't write!" "I'm dumb!" "This is boring!" I took a deep breath. I thought about leaving the room to go have my lunch, or at least make him think that I was going to have lunch, but I wasn't sure I could trust him not to break something. I did not want to engage, but I also did not want him to continue to throw a tempter trantrum in my room. The principal hadn't been much help. The counselor and Student Support guy were not in the building. I had no one to call.

So I called his mother. As I dialed I prayed that he had a healthy amount of fear of his mother, and simultaneously acknowledged that he probably did not. As soon as I handed him my cell phone and he crawled crying in to the corner, I realized I had made a mistake. Triple crap. Now he was using up my cell minutes complaining about me to his mom.

While he whimpered about mean teachers I went over the events in my head to see if/how I had screwed this up. I had not raised my voice. I had attempted to negotiate (which they say you never should with terrorists, by the way). I had been kind and supportive, but firm. He had to do his work. This was a major test of boundaries, and I'd be damned if I gave an inch. (But, cell phone? Sure, take it.)

I finally did raise my voice to insist that he hand back my cell phone. Miraculously he did and then agreed to go to the office for the rest of recess. I spent the rest of my lunch talking down his mother (again on the phone) who was understadably confused and upset to have such an introduction to her child's teacher. In the end, she agreed that setting boundaries was important. And after lunch, David was a perfect angel, as he was again today. He's a smart kid after all.

I guess he really just hates Chorus.