Jace Flores Student Teacher Blog

Probably the least savory thing about teaching is disciplining, especially if you have to write up students that you like. My general philosophy with disciplining is I try to give the kids as many exit strategy opportunities as possible, as one may call it in geopolitical terms. With how important relationships are, writing up a kid feels awkward, it feels bad and it could very well sour something that was going fairly well up to that point. So I usually start off by trying to ignore it, maybe have a general class call of attention so that there is no need to single out kids. If the distractions or issues at hand continue then I’ll escalate to singling out kids to have their attention and cooperation. If that does not work, that is when I will get to writing up kids. Now I have had only one day where it felt necessary to write up kids, and the above picture is an example of a log I did for a student whose information has been redacted as you can see. I gave them every opportunity to not have to deal with a write up, the opportunities were squandered and the punishment was meted. While admittedly there was some catharsis, I mostly felt negative about the whole thing, because these are kids I like. But I think this illustrates the importance of good relationships with clear student-teacher boundaries.