THE WORST CLASS EVER
What went wrong?
I’ve had great classes and bad classes and everything in between. Usually even a bad class has several decently behaved kids who want to learn. But there was one sixth grade from a very long time ago. They hated me. They hated the vice-principal even more. But most of all, they hated each other.
The vice-principal was strolling by my room on the first day of school and felt the need to stop in to remove Coriander Gladwell. He heard her yelling at me within the first fifteen minutes of the school year. She didn’t like her seat. She didn’t want to sit in the second row. She wanted to sit in the back. He removed her and the room was quiet.
There was James, who by the end of the first week, showed academic promise. He had many questions and seemed genuinely interested in learning. But when he happened to mention to his dad that David was in his class, Dad came straight to school the next day and demanded that he be removed from the class. David had made James’ life a living hell all through fifth grade, and that wasn’t going to happen again.
I was worried about David finding someone else to bully, but he ended up being a small fish among the piranhas. While he always looked ready for a fight, and always gave off the vibe that he was just waiting for a confrontation, David was pretty smart and, as long as I kept him busy, his behavior and academic achievement were okay.
Then there was smart, quiet Rhonda. She loved learning. Her family moved out of town before Christmas.
With my two standout students gone, I was left with the rest. I never saw a group of students get along so poorly. Ronkey’s initial crime was his name. I forbade the class from continuing to call him Donkey, but he did have to live with hearing kids “heehaw” at him on the playground and occasionally in the classroom, always from the opposite direction on my sightline, and always by a student who was surrounded by other students. I confronted a small group one day after hearing the dreaded “heehaw”. They told me they hated him because he was always giving them the finger. I kept watch and I saw it. I reprimanded Ronkey, but the gestures and noises continued periodically.
Then there was Hertzog from Hungary who refused to speak a word of English or communicate with anyone, except for curse words and obscene gestures. He attended ESL classes, but if he learned anything while there he refused to apply it, and the school could not put him in the level one bilingual program because the instruction was in Spanish. So Hertzog sat in my class all year, eyeing his classmates suspiciously and communicating with bad words and shoves.
Aaron was very hyperactive. He grabbed at the lab materials, often knocking them over or breaking things. He called out. He was out of his seat all the time. That said, he always had a smile on his face and usually apologized for his transgressions, twenty times a day. For the first month of school, Aaron was my biggest problem.
In the beginning of October, the vice-principal called me down to his office to utter the lie every teacher dreads.
“Ms. Gerard, there’s a student who I think will be good with you.” Brad was a twelve-year-old fifth grader. He had been retained. He had been retained once before. He was extremely hyperactive and was a very poor reader. They put him with one teacher, but that didn’t work out. They tried him with another teacher, thinking he needed a strong male role model. That didn’t work out either. The new solution was to promote him to sixth grade and give him to me. Brad almost made me forget about Aaron and David. Brad was bigger, louder, and more aggressive toward other students. I was wrongly worried that Brad and Aaron would team up. They hated each other. They regularly fought on the playground and occasionally in the classroom.
There was more. Coriander never settled down and she fought me on the simplest of requests. “Put away your math book and take out your science book” could cause a meltdown directed toward me, or could cause her to turn around and take the science book off someone else’s desk.
Then there was Norah. Norah wasn’t as verbally aggressive as Coriander, but hardly a day went by that she wasn’t in a fight with someone, either in or out of class.
Lunch was fourth period. I often thought that my fifth period lesson plans should just read: “I will not be teaching anything. I will be standing in the doorway trying to figure out why my girls are crying and who did what to whom while the rest of the class pokes and curses at each other and Brad runs laps around the room while taking other people’s things to precipitate a chase.”
Then I had the Gang of Four, four girls who remained relatively quiet while working. They often asked me questions about myself. This ended when I found out they were sneaking into the classroom and going through my desk and my garbage during lunchtime to find things out about me. I had thought these girls were being friendly, but I became very uneasy knowing that I was being stalked.
It was a long, arduous year. I was with this group all day, every day. I continually revised my tactics. I put them in rows. I arranged them in groups. I rearranged the groups again and again. I tried teaching the class as a whole, then followed with an assignment of independent work. When that didn’t work, I assigned group projects. I paired them up. I tried cooperation and competition, energetic and low-key, hands-on and paper-and-pencil. I never hit a decent stride all year and I can’t point to anything I accomplished beyond making it to the end of June.
What could I have done differently with this group? I am a very task-oriented person. In most situations, this has served my students well. I specialized in sticking to the academics and keeping the emotional temperature very low. If I had to do this year again, I would stop marching ahead academically, focus on getting to know each student individually, and take a chance on setting up an environment in which students were encouraged to share their personal experiences. Maybe I would have emphasized journal writing and sharing. Maybe I would have done less math and more art. Maybe I would have spent less time monitoring misbehavior and more time playing board games. I can’t say for sure that this would have achieved anything, but it’s something I could have tried. It might have backfired, but I’ll never know. I do know that for the rest of my career, I looked back whenever things were tough, and knew that if I made it through this year from hell, I could manage anything. Sometimes this is what teaching is like.
