Teachable Moment and Lesson Learned!

I had a minor victory today.

My classes have been giving oral/PowerPoint presentations for the last few days, and today everything was going well in class 11.2 (not the case in another class where I tried two computers and two projectors before I got all the technology working). Of course, that's a lead-in to what went wrong, but I should first explain that giving a 3-5 minute oral presentation in English is pretty intimidating for most of my kids. They cope by burying their heads in their papers, mumbling, looking everywhere except the audience, or speaking so softly you can't hear them. To help them out, I keep the rest of the kids as quiet as possible, and I get frustrated on behalf of the presenters when the class is disruptive.

It's hard enough to keep 30 youngsters in the class quiet, but when a group of students from another class started making noise right outside the door, talking, applauding, and peeping in (distracting the presenter, the rest of the class, and me), I started to get angry. When the presentation was over, I went to the door to have some words with them, but I must have had my "angry walk" on because by the time I got to the door, they had scattered, sprinting down the hall like zebras fleeing a hungry lion. By that time, I was really POd, and I roared down the hall at them. (I don't really remember what I said, but it was loud and mad-sounding).

The trouble was that I only saw one face, and while I could make some guesses about the other identities, I wasn't sure enough to do anything. But I was pretty sure that they had come from class 11.1, so when I got there I made a "that was really disrespectful, but I'm sorry I yelled" speech in a "I know who you are" way. And then I suggested that they write a letter of apology to the student whose presentation they disrupted.

And here's the amazing part: THEY DID.

One kid wrote the letter, and the rest of them signed it. I don't know what felt better, solving my own little whodunit, or watching them do the right thing when they didn't have to.

Today was a good day to be a teacher.