VICTORY!

Yes, I mean victory. Seriously. I won the teaching game. At least for this month.

Seeing as I’m not a teacher, my teaching methods have been slowly developing and evolving over time. (I guess that would maybe happen anyway.. yeah.)

This term, I’ve been focusing on 1) trying hard and 2) following directions. Since I am teaching a mostly-new batch of grade 8 learners from various primary schools, it’s taken a bit of time to get everyone on the same page. But I think I won.

At the beginning of the term, as always, about a quarter to a third of the kids would do any given homework assignment. They always forgot to bring their books and pens to class and were generally unprepared. I know there’s the argument that “the ones who care will do their work,” but it is really difficult to conduct maths class when half of them can’t take notes or do written work for one reason or another!

So, like I did last year, we’ve been combining positive rewards and negative punishments. Every day I tick off whether they did their homework (not necessarily correctly… just attempted). If my learners do their homework every day for a week, they get a prize (a pencil, some stickers, a few sweets, whatever). Then, I told them my philosophy. If you mess up one time, that’s just a mistake… you might not get a sweet, but you also shouldn’t get punished for one mistake. But if you don’t do your homework two or more times in a week, that’s a problem, and you should be punished. The last time I held detention, they sat for two and a half hours, wrote “Homework is given to help me learn. I will do my homework next time.” 200 times. Then they did their homework for the next day. Then they all told me, “Miss, I will do my homework every day now. I hate your detention. I will never come again.” Touché, kids.

Last week, more than half of my learners got the 5-days-of-homework prize, and only 4 of them sat detention. Today, 107/110 learners did their homework on time! The other teachers have started asking me what my secret is, because they’re still struggling to get the kids to do their work. I’m just so incredibly proud when I can attribute it to my NOT-CORPORAL-PUNISHMENT classroom management!

This is totally irrelevant. But IT RAINED LAST WEEK in Tses! Obviously all of my kids went outside and had a huge sand/mud battle. It was wonderful.