Yell

When a teacher yells, all it does is teach the kids that the teacher is out of control. A good teacher uses behavior management plans, creative lessons, and good old fashion hard work to keeping a class running smoothly. But, I yelled. It was dumb. All I did was let the kids know that I have a breaking point and they found it. Now I am going to pay. They will try to find the breaking point over and over again. If only I could spend my energies planning my lessons and working on behavior management plans. But, this week, I had two 8th grade IEPs on Tuesday that took the entire day, so my class that is full of students who don't do well with change, spent the entire day in different classes doing "independent work." I stayed till 5:15 last night writing one IEP and I still have another one to finish. And, we are getting audited tomorrow by the LRE people, so they'll be observing me, and one of the things they will be looking at are the IEPs. And, I couldn't stay late today because Betty had Irish dance class (and she missed the last two classes), so I tried to get some stuff done while I had my students work on projects, but of course they were throwing gang signs across the room and calling each other names and basically complaining about everything, everything, everything. So, today I yelled. I will try to do better tomorrow.