Earlier this year our little program was in the depths of student misbehavior. A couple of strong role models were pretty much running the place with chronic defiance and bullying. We had tried everything we could think of to change the tide and were at a loss. By this point students had lost nearly every…
As an attention-getting device the yodeling emergency button is barely passable. The yodel is quiet, and the students either giggle or yodel loudly when it is played. As a community-building device, however, it has come in handy. I put it up one day, and no one noticed until I began to run around asking if…
Many caped teachers listen to NPR. On the way to work this morning, this caped teacher heard this news story about a bullying program our district elementary schools have been using. In the story a middle school is using it, and many of the comments by the principal and the students reminded me of my…
Okay, I wasn’t going to do this. I wasn’t going to post this on the blog. It crosses the boundary, I know. Here is the quandary… if I don’t share this masterpiece of an issue, the masses will not have the correct image of what cape-wearing truly entails. If I do share it, I will…
Warning–This conversation would be rated PG-13. It would be, if folks rated this kind of thing. E. is a very bright, very oppositional 7th grader. He is truly quite funny and entertaining, but he gets the class so riled up, he has to be tempered a bit. One of his skills is to weasel out…
J. showed up in my room today with a note from the teacher next door that said “Please keep him busy as long as you can.” This means that his constant stream of chatter (most of it inappropriate) had reached its peak and needed a reset. I reached in to the canyons of my Super…
M. has a cough. It is an obnoxious cough and quite distracting. M. comes to school anyway and does not have a ride home if he is sick. On such occasions it might be appropriate to serve hot tea. This caped teacher found some organic lime tea that comes, amazingly, in the form of a…
Teachers are like camels. We can hold our water all day if we need to. It is quite a hassle to orchestrate a trip to the ladies room, so some of us wait as long as possible. When I need to leave, I have to let the aide know, or I have to call someone…
I’ve read, reviewed, and discussed a wide variety of books and curricula on community building, the teaching of pro-social skills in at-risk teens, developing a classroom management system through the development of a community. What I’ve learned though, can be summarized by this photo. When I was putting together my classroom on the first days…
My school is in the middle of a pretty dicey part of town–next to the street names you hear most often on the police news. While the kids were getting on the bus after school, a man on a horse came by. That was odd, to say the least. But, joy-upon-joys,the students all said excitedly–“It’s…
Wear The Cape 