Disruptive Students Test Many Novice Teachers

Third-year teacher Kate Bond is trying desperately to analyze a poem with her third-graders, but a boy in the front of the room keeps interrupting.

Bond tells him to stop fiddling with a plastic box on his desk. She snatches his writing journal to stop him from doodling. She sends him to an empty table for bothering a classmate.

Finally, at her wits’ end, Bond orders the boy into the hallway.

“You can’t do this,” she tells the sulking 9-year-old. “I have to teach this class.”

Those of us in California who keep an eye on schools may want to take heed of Bond’s classroom at South Park Elementary because of the sober truth it reveals: Our teachers are waging a sometimes losing battle to maintain order in their classrooms.

That simple fact has ominous implications in a state that is demanding mighty results from schools staffed by legions of inexperienced teachers. All the talk about standards, testing and accountability may only be a dream if your third-graders are whacking one another with pencils as you try to analyze a poem.

“I spend half my day dealing with discipline,” said Bond, 25. “Every couple of weeks I have a meltdown when I can’t handle it anymore. Then I regroup and have a new plan.”

Bond’s struggle makes for lively drive time conversation with her husband, Bruce Halling, who has been teaching at the South Los Angeles campus for 2 1/2 years and works in the classroom next door.

“It’s the thing we talk about most,” said Halling, 31. “There are always a couple of kids who don’t care and they’re the real challenge.”

That challenge grows exponentially in secondary schools, where adolescence turns cuddly children into walking hormones.

Lisa Hollenbeck began her teaching career at Emerson Middle School in Westwood last October. Some days it seems like her students are bouncing out of their seats--a problem that is particularly noticeable in her math class for students with English as a second language. On a recent day, one boy doodled in his notebook and others chatted in Spanish with their friends as Hollenbeck tried earnestly to teach a lesson about division.

“I help those kids who want to learn,” Hollenbeck, 39, said. “You want everybody to succeed, but you can’t help everybody.”

Classroom rookies and veterans alike know all too well that one disruptive student can thwart even the most traveled and dedicated instructor. But managing a classroom presents the biggest stumbling block for newcomers who have to learn the tricks of the trade on the fly.

And there are plenty of them. About 40,000 teachers in California--14% of the state’s instructors--are working with emergency credentials, meaning they haven’t finished all of the course work and training to be deemed fully qualified.

Novices tend to be concentrated in the lowest-performing schools--those in neighborhoods of stubborn poverty, where students and parents alike are still learning English. Those teachers are victims of an absurd pecking order that values seniority over need and typically consigns the greenest teachers to the toughest jobs.

“The children in the state of California who need a fully qualified and effective teacher the most are the least likely to get one,” said Margaret Gaston, co-director of the Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning in Santa Cruz.

Teacher training programs, of course, try to expose newcomers to the turbulence of the classroom. They do this through seminars and discussions about methods for maintaining order. The reality is far more jarring--like the difference between studying battlefield maps in a dark war room and dodging shrapnel in a fox hole.

Inside the classroom, teachers survive by jury-rigging a system of warnings and bribes, rewards and punishments. Students who behave earn points or Monopoly money that can be redeemed for pencils, notebooks and other goodies. Those who break the rules get time outs on the side of the room or forgo recess or wind up in the dean’s office.

The key to a productive classroom, teachers agree, lies in establishing firm guidelines from the outset.

“If you set clear standards for behavior and you let the kids know what the discipline will be, you will have a fairly smooth year for the most part,” said Melissa Chin, a third-grade teacher at Fanning Elementary in the Orange County city of Brea. “Most students need a lot of structure. That’s how kids are.”

At Emerson Middle School, Principal Charlotte Lerchenmuller helps her teachers establish structure in the classroom by giving them a sheet of do’s and don’ts.

Under the do’s: Write the daily agenda on the front board, tell your students what they will learn each day, float around the room during class and start each period with a warmup activity such as writing in a journal.

“The good teachers bring out the best in the kids,” Lerchenmuller said. “A natural teacher will always have an outstanding classroom. . . . It’s really an art.”

Emerson history teacher Tom Iannucci is a textbook example of how to do it right.

Iannucci begins each class by having his students write in a journal for five minutes--on a recent day, they wrote about what they learned the day before.

The 14-year veteran floated around his classroom as he led a discussion about Charlemagne, kneeling to answer one girl’s question or to get a boy’s attention.

He entertained his students’ ideas about an assignment he had given--to create a storybook about their history lesson--and he told them that 80% of their grade would depend on what they wrote, not the pictures they drew.

“It took me five years before I felt comfortable with my classroom management skills,” Iannucci said. “To walk in the classroom [with no experience] and think you can manage 35 12-year-olds, you’re kidding yourself. You’re just going to learn by trial and error.”