Max Crimp

EDUC 302-303

Aiding Journal 6

Today was an interesting week. It was the first week back from my students
spring break, so I expected their behavior to be more rowdy and active since they
had just come back from a week long of relaxation and being able to turn their
brains off for a while. However, I noticed just the opposite. Instead of being rowdy
and rambunctious like I had anticipated, the students were on much behavior over
the course of the entire week.
This was an interesting thing for me to discover. I would have expected that
the students would be much more antsy and talkative. I would have expected their
attention level to be lower than before the break. I was shocked to see that the
opposite held true. The students were much more attentive than normal, and the
students were less talkative. There was less side chatter, less getting up and moving
around, less goofing off, and less students had to miss recess due to misbehavior.
Throughout the week, I wondered what the cause of the good behavior was. Was it
due to the students still getting back into the school mode, or was it a totally
different unrelated reason? These are questions that I am sure I will find the
answers too as I progress in my teaching career.
I also wonder how long the good behavior will last for my class. I know that a
few students started to regress in their good behavior by the end of the week, but as
a whole, the class was exponentially more well behaved this week than in any of the
previous weeks that I have aided there. I hope that this good behavior is a new trend
that the students begin to embrace on a day-to-day basis!
Chapter 8 of Oakes, Lipton, Anderson and Stillman is all about classroom
management. However, this week the students were so well behaved that most of
the knowledge from this chapter never came into play. However, I am fairly certain
that this exemplary show of good behavior cannot go on forever. I need to be ready
for the day when my classroom is not behaving well, and I need to know effective
ways to manage those types of situations. I really like the idea of assertive discipline
(pp. 230-231). I think that assertive discipline is an effective method for me to use in
my classroom. I think that the students react and respond better to assertive
discipline. This is a method that I see their teacher use quite a bit. This way, the
students are still being disciplined, but not being treated like they are in 1
st
grade.
3
rd
graders, as I have found, like to act like they are much older than they really are.
Therefore, they expect to be treated like they are older. I think that assertive
discipline allows them to realize that they did something wrong, but that we do not
think they are less of a person because of it.

Oakes, J., Lipton, M., Anderson, A. & Stillman, J. (2013). Teaching to change the world
(4th ed.). Boulder, CO: Paradigm.