Consistently Inconsistent

[Editor's note: Miss Frazzled is the pseudonym of a third-year teacher in an elementary school in the Bronx.]

Children need structure. I really believe that. And I’ve tried this year to add structure, routines, and consequences for bad behavior to our behavior management plans. But it seems that every time I try to structure our class just a little bit, my plans self-destruct through no fault of my own. Case in point:

“Table points” sounded like a supreme idea, nice and easy: give each table a tally if all members work together and do the right thing. On Friday, the entire table gets a treat. Sounds great right? Wrong. The table lay-out in our class changes as often as the weather. How can you continue to give table points to a table if the original members sitting at that table who earned the table points in the first place are no longer there? They’ve been moved to another table, and Table 2 has suddenly merged with Table 1, creating a huge talkative entity. Table points: out.

Then there was the ever popular option: stars at the end of the day. If a child did the right thing for most of the day and didn’t land on the “call-home box,” she got a star next to her name. At the end of the week if she had five stars she got to pick a prize. But my co-teacher decided that big prizes were unfair to give out, so guess what? I had to scrap that behavior management plan as well. Stars at the end of the day: out.

So the chaotic year zooms on, and we have finally found a plan that we all can agree on, because being consistently inconsistent is no way to be.

Tagged: Bronx, elementary school

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