A few years ago, I did a semester-long stint as a substitute teacher. I’d never had any kind of pedagogical training and had no clue what to do when a particularly loud-mouthed seventh-grader wouldn’t sit and keep his mouth shut during the “quiet homework time” that the teacher’s notes told me that the kids were good with.
After about 45 repetitive minutes of:
“Jeremy?”
“Yes, Mr. Trisler?”
“Sit. Down.”
Two ideas struck me:
- Never do this again.
- If the problem is that he won’t be quiet, use that to humiliate the kid.
The brilliant thing about that second idea is that it worked.
"Under Pressure" by goran konjevod on Flickr
I made Jeremy (or whatever his name was), go to the front of the class and give a speech about something he knew nothing about. I think I made his topic something like “The Distribution of Causational Philosophies Among the Space-Time Matrix, As Outlined in Jane Austen’s ‘Pride and Prejudice.’”
It didn’t actually humiliate him – which feels good to me in an ethical sense – but it gave him the attention he wanted, in a sanctioned – and therefore, much less disruptive – manner, and suddenly turned me into everybody’s favorite sub. Which wasn’t what I planned, but I’m not about to complain.
Every class I had for the rest of the day begged me to do the same for them. I highly recommend this technique to any teacher struggling to rein in an unruly loudmouth kid.
But, since no scientific theory is proven until the evidence is repeated, I present you with Act Two of this last week’s “This American Life,” called “Lewis Time,” in which student, loudmouth, and lovable scamp Lewis de la Cruz turns his school life around after his teachers implement something very similar to (and maybe actually funnier than) the impromptu speeches I made my students give.
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