Timothy Mason's Site

Difficult question - and I certainly wouldn't claim to know the answer. You have to take into account the offending child herself, the child she regularly attacks, the other children in the class, and the other members of your establishment. (On this, have you talked to her other teachers, and has she rung any alarm bells elsewhere than in your class? Or is it something she tries on in the FL class rather than elsewhere?)

Child psychologists tend to believe that punishment doesn't do much good. If you want to change behaviour, reward the good and ignore the bad ; if she makes prejudiced remarks, simply take no notice - certainly not make any big deal of it - and after a while she'll stop. Makes sense - but there are other people involved here. How does the child that is being victimized feel? Perhaps you could have a word with her, explaining to her that you understand her pain, and tell her what you intend to do, and why. You might also talk to the other children in the class (this is what Michael Rutter recommends), for you wouldn't want them to think that your apparent inaction amounted to condoning the behaviour.

I would not, personally, think it a good idea to put the other student on the spot in the way that is suggested here. You may find that the child herself reacts very negatively, particularly if she is, as you say, shy. And I'd like to think that the school is, whatever some teachers may wish to believe, a place where children are fully educated - how can it not be, when children spend so much of their lives there? - and that we are there to help children learn how to be with each other. Calling the police - who represent the necessary repressive functions of the state, rather than its socializing ones - should only be the very last resort in an educational setting.

Best wishes

Timothy Mason

No, it doesn't. No teacher can be expected to to work with out of control pupils without help from the administration - this is particularly the case for a beginner such as yourself. I suggest that you need to talk to your colleagues about the situation that you find yourself in, and you need to speak to a senior administrator. If these people will not help you, then you are in a badly run school. You should not feel yourself to be responsable for a programme which you had no part in designing, and the success of which does not interest the principal actors. You should also contact the institution in which you were trained and talk to one or other of your professors.

Now look to your own practice. How well-prepared are you for your classes? How clear are your objectives? How fast is your pacing? Do you have a sufficient number of varied activities?

Take no notice of the silly remarks or the criticisms - it is often the case that these will die out if the teacher makes it clear that they are of no interest by ignoring them. Do not allow them to play last year's teacher off against you ... they probably gave her an equally hard time too. The results of tests given at the beginning of the year are almost always catastrophic. This should come as no surprise ; the learners have certainly had no contact with the language during the long summer vacation, and will need a period of readaptation. Certainly, they will need to revisit structures and functions that they have already covered - this is normal ; you should think of the curriculum as a spiral, which always goes back over the same material, hopefully deepening understanding and capacity at each twist of the thread.

Regards

Timothy Mason

Valerie It is difficult to help out with your problem, because you don't tell us what you are doing with them. I would suggest that some of the following books might help : Drama Techniques in Language Learning, Maley and Duff, Cambridge Discussions That Work - task centred fluency practice, Penny Ur, Cambridge Making communicative Language Teaching Happen, Lee & Patten, McGraw Hill The Practice of English Language Teaching, Jeremy Harmer, Longman

It could be that part of your problem is that the group is very small ; this can dampen down classroom dynamics, and needs a very different style of approach from frontal teaching with a large class. One thing that can work is to throw an interesting picture up on the OHP, and then let them talk about it - do not be afraid of silence, but leave them the space to react and encourage them to talk to each other, rather than to you. Once they get used to the idea that you are *not* going to fill up all the gaps for them, they may feel a greater need to participate.

If people are going to talk, they usually need to have a meaningful reason to do so ; try to give them tasks to do that can only be realized if they talk to each other - this is what the information gap is all about ; it is not sufficient for A to know something that B does not - B has to have a need for that information. If this can be placed within the context of a real life project, so much the better, but that can't always be done.

One way you could start them off is by playing guessing games with them - they have to find out what you have hidden in your bag, or who you are, by asking questions. Some of the lateral thinking routines work quite well - the man on the bed, the body in the hangar, or the six one-armed men in the desert all go down well. Then transfer the teacher's role to one of the students - giving them a card with the answer to the enigma on it - although sometimes one of them turns out to have a new mystery for you.

Best of luck

Timothy Mason

I see that advice about not smiling before Christmas is still going strong. I usually smile the first time I see a class. I even laugh and make jokes. And I continue doing so throughout the year. I also teach things, and the students learn. And when I see that young teachers are advised to be grim- faced and rigid for about half the academic year, I understand why it is that so many children and adolescents do not like school. Which is why I give no such advice to the teachers I do train - on the contrary, I tell them that there is no reason to be scared of a bunch of fifteen year-olds. Or eleven-year olds. Or eighteen year-olds. And the trainees come back and they tell me that I was right to give them that advice.

Of course you need barriers and you need to establish distance. But one can be firm without being gloomy. And of course, there are difficult classes and difficult times. But good humour gets you through those difficulties a lot better than most other stratagems one might use. And after 25 years or more of teaching, I still enjoy it. I'm not 'burnt out'. Oh, and whenever I hear one of those teachers' common-room conversations about how awful the children are, how stupid and knowledge resistant they are, I go away and do something less depressing, like having a chat with one of the 'lunkheads'

. Have a good vacation

(tmason@cie.fr) St. Germain-en-Laye France

I believe that it is possible to prevent teacher burn-out in most cases. Schools where young teachers are treated with courtesy and understanding by administrators and colleagues suffer lower rates of burn-out. Schools where colleagues in danger of burning out are offered support and counselling suffer lower rates of burn-out. Where there is an esprit de corps and a desire to teach things to children, teachers burn-out less frequently - I have noticed that this is often the case in schools with large numbers of children in difficulty.

Burn-out occurs most frequently in schools where there is constant conflict between the administration and the teaching staff, where there are high levels of conflict between pupils and staff over non-enforceable rules, and where there is no clear policy as to educational aims - take a look at Michael Rutter's work on this, or the study carried out by Reynolds on schools in Wales. It is in such schools that the 'common-room culture' becomes most poisonous, with continual moans about the stupidity of the children, the uselessness of pedagogy and of 'liberal' educational ideas - it is a culture which unfortunately swallows up the young teacher and quickly dampens her original enthusiasm. It has been the appearance of elements of this culture on the list, and some disquiet on my part about the effects that this might have on people new to the profession, that lead to my original posting, and it may be that disquiet that lead to my being rather sharper than I should have been.

There is no reason to feel superior to, or dismissive of burnt-out colleagues. Their condition is far more likely to be the result of structural problems and poorly thought-through policies than it is to be a sign of any deep character flaw in their part. The problem won't be solved by inviting them to leave the profession, although it might be a small step in the right direction to invest in programmes to help retrain and place those teachers who feel that they can no longer carry on.

Best regards Timothy Mason

Abuse of teachers, as R points out, antedates e-mail by several centuries. May I suggest, in my milk-sop liberal way, that it is perfectly comprehensible, given the way that school works, and, for some children, not without justification. When you personally become the object of such abuse, you need to approach it as a professional ; this means that, in the first place, you distinguish between your role as an agent and representative of the educational system, on the one hand, and your 'me-ness' on the other ; the target of most such attacks is the former, and not the latter. Just as the psychoanalyst has to deal with the aggression of counter-transfer, so does the teacher have to be able to deal with the anguish, discomfort and annoyance which are by-products of the educational system.

This being so, I am unable to dismiss, as do both R and T, the individuals who do this kind of thing as members of some lower life-form. Nor are they sick ; they are reacting in a perfectly predictable way to the more negative aspects of the schooling to which they have been exposed. These children are in as much, if not greater, need of our pedagogical skills as any other. Do not allow yourself to be wounded by their activities - they are not directed at the real you, in any case - but do not reject them without further thought either.

Best wishes

Timothy Mason

There seems to be a consensus amongst those who deal with the modeling of behaviour that, if you want learners to behave in a particular way, you reward the behaviour you are interested in, and ignore behaviours which differ. On this basis, you would reinforce use of the FL by responding to it, and would not respond to use of the L1. When pupils are working in groups or in pairs, react positively when they use the FL, but do not punish use of L1 ; punishment can have unpredictable effects, and may be experienced by the pupil as rewarding. I am far from being absolutely convinced by this approach, which you will have recognised as behaviouristic. Nevertheless, it seems reasonable from other perspectives to expect that a teacher who spends her time on negative discipline may achieve lower degrees of pedagogical efficiency than one who stresses the positive side of things. Best wishes Timothy Mason

This sounds like it should be a good idea. But :

1. Most problem children *can* and *should* be dealt with in a normal school setting. Teachers need to be trained in how to handle such children, rather than being encouraged to wish the problem off onto someone else. The Dos and Don'ts are very much the same as those which are recommended to parents.

2. Where children have been systematically excluded from normal schooling on account of their behaviour, the criteria for evaluating them have been applied in ways which leave grave suspicions as to what, exactly, is going on. In the U.K., young males of West-Indian origin had a far higher chance of being funneled into special classes than did other children. Unless it can be shown that decisions are taken for clear, justifiable reasons, and that they are applied in a uniform manner, any such system will arouse anger, frustration, and further alienate just those groups which you wish to convince of the positive nature of schooling.

3. The record of special institutions is not particularly encourgaging - indeed, they are often far worse in their long-term effects than doing nothing at all. We may justify our exclusion of some children on the grounds that they interfere with the well-being of the rest ; does this also justify shutting them up in the pedagogical equivalent of a trash-can? Those children who, for some reason or another, are so severely damaged that they cannot function in normal schools, or that normal schoolteachers do not know how to function with them in their classes, are in need of intensive, expensive and well-thought out treatment. Until states are willing to grasp that particular nettle, our calls for exclusions may only be making a bad problem worse.

Best wishes

Timothy Mason

No - we are talking about the same children. *Most* of these children can be dealt with in a normal school setting, using techniques which are not particularly difficult to acquire, once you have become convinced that they work. Basically, ignore bad behaviour, and reward good behaviour. Where a child is extremely disruptive, it can help to enlist the support of other children in the class, and to explain to them that they should cease to encourage the behaviour.

I also said that there were some children who could not be dealt with in school ; they are very few and far between, and they are usually extremely disturbed, for one reason or another. L's son was evidently thrown off balance by his sojourn in the institution in which he was placed by the authorities ; itself an all too grim warning of how children deemed to be fragile are treated. It may be that this experience put him - temporarily - beyond schooling, but I am not convinced that, with teachers who had been properly trained to handle difficult children, he could not have continued to benefit from a normal classroom.

You may wonder why teachers should have to receive special training if the numbers of disruptive children are as small as I have suggested ; however, the techniques and attitudes required of teachers to handle the disturbed child are also useful in their dealings with ordinary children. The demand that the teacher should acquire a set of child-handling techniques as part of his or her professional baggage does not seem to me unreasonable, nor does it necessarily mean sacrificing standards in the subject matter taught.

Best wishes

Timothy Mason

An article in the London Times - available on the Web - dated Saturday, tells us that Mozart may soothe the savage breast. After Anne Savan, a science teacher, who found herself having to deal with an almost uncontrollable class, a group of 13 slow learners, ten of whom had been identified as having behavioural problems, took to playing concertos by the maestro, noise levels dropped and the quality of work improved 'to such an extent that most were only one level behind expectations for 14 year-olds when they took national curriculum tests'. Ms Savan believes that Mozart works because he wrote in a higher register than other composers.

Academics (aaaaghhh!) at London University found that hyperactive children benefited most from the calming influence of music played during maths lessons - but pupils of all types increased their work-rate. Back to Suggestopaedia folks.

Regards

Timothy Mason

If we think in terms of individual interaction, rather than in terms of the institution, we will fall into the trap of apportioning blame, rather than of working out why whatever happened happened. The teacher will try to trace in her own behaviour or personality some moment or some quirk that lead to a child's becoming hostile to her, and the child will remain convinced that his or her pain, discomfort or irritation is to be set at the door of an individual teacher.

It may happen that an individual teacher's behaviour sparks off an unpleasant incident of some kind, just as it may happen that a child's naughtiness may greatly displease a teacher. But the behaviour ocurrs within an institutional setting, and the negative behaviours are determined and shaped by that setting. This is why relational problems between teachers and pupils should always be considered within the context of the school as a whole - indeed, I would go further, and suggest that they should be considered within the context of the school-system as a whole.

However, realisitically, such questions should not be left up to individual teachers to sort out, but should be the object of a school-wide policy, discussed between all partners ; this means teachers, administrators, parents and children. Irene should not be looking to blame herself for what happened - although, if she ever does find out who it was (not a very important consideration, really) she may wish to analyse why the situation arose. This is not the same thing as asking 'what did I do to him/her?', but is rather the professional question 'Was a mistake made, and can such errors be avoided in the future?'

Best wishes

Timothy Mason