It is what we in the profession call ‘ballsing up’ but I put that down to being a naïve young teacher on his first school trip, wet behind the ears and a bit green.
I’d given the words too much emotion and power. Telling those two children on the coach to put a sock in it was wrong because I’d lost my rag and I’d let the day’s events get the better of me. Wouldn’t it have just been easier to have told the students involved here to ‘shut up’? Put a sock in it … Not unsurprisingly, this caused a real hoo-ha and things blew up a little! Unbelievably, this isn’t an isolated incident with another teacher doing the same thing with another pupil in a different school. One of the more radical and inappropriate classroom management techniques to use, is duct tape as one teacher in the US did! If students just won’t stop chatting, there are lots of strategies you can use to settle things down. As it turned out, no parents came, social services were not involved and I learnt a valuable lesson which is why I’ve been telling kids to button it ever since. “You’ve let yourself down, your class down and the whole school down! You’ll have parents knocking down your door tomorrow!” and he carried on chatting to the driver.Īnother colleague said, “Well, that’s their emotional well-being and sense of self-worth down the drain!” Their concern was overwhelming. The colleague sitting next to me smiled and said:
I don’t actually remember saying “Shut it!” but I do remember that the front half of the coach fell silent for about 10 minutes whilst the other half were oblivious and continued mucking about. Incidents: one child abused the Whispering Gallery acoustics with “Jordan is a tosser”, another had mocked some German tourists with a ‘Sieg Heil’ salute and a third stole a CD entitled ‘My Spirit Hath Rejoiced’. The coach was hot and stuffy and my patience was running on empty. When I started teaching, I once told two children to “Shut it!” on our way home from a trip to St Paul’s Cathedral. Is it easier for teachers to tell their students to ‘shut up’? In between teaching jobs, I worked as an Ofsted inspector (no hate mail please!), national in-service provider, project. John DabellI trained as a primary school teacher 25 years ago, starting my career in London and then I taught in a range of schools in the Midlands.
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