Thread: What was your worst classroom discipline experience?

^ Spoil my class room story you bastards

Mongrel bastards

At the time it felt like the worst problem in the world. I was doing my practice teaching and being observed by my university professor. I was teaching grade 1 at the time. As I was teaching, a boy in the third row kept getting up and standing up in his seat yelling out loud. I think he had tourette's, but at the time I wasn't sure. It was impossible to teach, as he was disrupting the class. I turned the lights off, and had everyone put their head down on their desks for a few minutes. Then I moved him to the back of the class. He seemed to mellow out after that, and I finished my lesson. The professor was impressed.

When I worked in a treatment center in the U.S. I had teenagers coming after me with knives, and telling me to 'fuck off bitch' every few minutes. I had to restrain them, and it wasn't a fun job. We were taught to restrain anyone that tries to attack us.

Thats interesting phuketbound hopefully people will not skip past the

^Just trying to stay on topic..

Wow - this thread makes my Korean students look like angels - absolute little darlings. I feel like buying them all candy after reading this. In some classes it can be difficult to keep them focused for 45 or 50 minutes at a time, but pretty well everything I've read above would be unthinkable at my school.

The one from Japan was just astounding. If the students at our school acted like that there'd be a mass beating in the corridor. Which is why that would never, ever happen at our school (the students can be pretty wild at break time, but they don't vandalise, act violently, etc.). In fact I'd be willing to bet that good % of the kids at that Japanese school feel absolutely terrorised - way more so than a timid Korean kid afraid of having to kneel on the floor for a while or get a swat with a stick for being late.

At any rate, the 'worst' disciplinary experience I've had started out fairly harmlessly in a year-two middle school (M2) class. In most of my classes the students sit in three long rows of pairs. I had one in which there were two chatterboxes sitting at the back of the third row. Well, rather than wait til they made me blow my top I made them change seats with two students at the front of the left and right row. Great, I thought, that was easily fixed. I had the students working on something and was monitoring them, walking around, and was at the back when suddenly the girl beside one of the ones I moved, let's call her Han-bet, explodes at the one I moved to the front, let's call her Tae-im. Han-bet is a rather dim, quiet kid who's always been incredibly respectful and tries her best despite having no aptitude for English. Suddenly she was yelling and swearing at Tae-im, with tears rolling down her face while she was shaking with anger. The class went silent and everyone was mesmorised by Han-bet's outburst. Now, Tae-im is a well known trouble-maker and I just assumed that she must have purposely said something to set Han-bet off, probably because she was pissed off at me for making her move. Later, I found out from talking to some kids sitting around them that this wasn't the case. At the time I decided I'd move Tae-im back to the back and deal with it after the lesson when things had calmed down. This had never happened to me before - a student getting violently angry and screaming her head off at a classmate in the middle of a lesson.

After class Tae-im tries to run off and I call her back, having to haul her back by the wrist, hoping that she can apologise to Han-bet and, whatever was said, I can leave it at that. Tae-im is starting to look absolutely indignant and furious towards me: not the 'I hate teachers and school' angry look but a 'WTF do you think you're doing, asshole' look. Suddenly Han-bet sets off at her again and bursts out bawling and I ask Tae-im what the hell she said to her; Tae-im (I'm thinking) won't say and she's really starting to piss me off. Then she bursts into tears, too; she gets punished a lot and isn't a crier. This was the first and only time I've seen her cry. I tell her just to go off to lunch and she runs out of the classroom in tears, followed not long after by Han-bet leaving in a similar state.

So it's time for a meeting with their homeroom teacher. Low and behold, I find out that Han-bet has done this kind of thing before for no reason. I knew she was strange but had no idea she had pretty serious mental health problems. Whatever Tae-im did or said to her was likely in her imagination. Great, thanks for warning me, co-workers. The homeroom teacher tells me not to worry about it too much. Then later in my after-school writing class I find out from a (very good) student who wouldn't lie and was sitting right behind them that Tae-im hadn't said a thing to Han-bet. I'm feeling like it's time for me to receive Asshole Teacher of the Week award. I looked up the Korean word for misunderstanding and apologised to Tae-im the next day; she kind of had a 'yeah, well who wouldn't always blame me' kind of response. A year later and she doesn't seem to like or dislike me any more than before.

So if that's my worst classroom disciplinary experience I guess, in light of the above, I should consider myself extremely lucky.

Originally Posted by bcqcboy

After class Tae-im tries to run off and I call her back, having to haul her back by the wrist,..........

I would not advise doing that in LOS, and would guarantee you, that would get you terminated and/or arrested in the USA.

Get a room Guys

Well, this pales in comparison to some of your stories, but here's mine...

When I started my first teaching job at an ECC franchise in Korea, I had no teaching experience and no knowledge of how to effectively manage a class. The school didn't help out much; their only advice was to send bad students to the head teacher to be disciplined. Within a couple of months I'd worked things out with most of my classes, and they were behaving pretty well, but I had one class of twelve Grade Six boys who were immune to anything I did. They'd chatter all class, play with toys, swear at me in Korean, get up and run around the classroom, crawl under tables... they were mostly about as big as I am and I, a 5'2 shy girl, was far, far out of my league. If I gave them extra work, they wouldn't do it. If I tried to send them to the head teacher, they'd go to the bathroom or something and come back five minutes later and lie that they'd gone to the head teacher. I had no idea what to do, so I'd mostly give them worksheets and spend the class going around standing next to each student until he'd finished. A couple of times I just gave up and sat at the front of the class doing nothing for the twenty minutes or whatever it was until class was finished.

Eventually, six months or so later, the class was split up and given to two different, male, more experienced teachers. Faced with having to do real schoolwork, most of the bad students quit within a couple of months. I've sinced learned how to discipline more effectively, and can now play the mean teacher when I have to.

Originally Posted by preezeplessone

I would not advise doing that in LOS, and would guarantee you, that would get you terminated and/or arrested in the USA.

I can remember once, during zero block (first block of the day used for extra lessons or self-study), seeing one homeroom teacher bringing two third-year high school (M6) students - 18-years-old - back to their classroom because he found them doddling around some other part of the school. He had each one by the wrist and was hauling them along like as if they were 4-year-olds who might run away. It's hard to imagine a more ridiculous sight at *high* school. It seems as though nothing's too infantile over here.