It's been amazing to have something to look forward to every day when I leave work. Instead of just being excited to finish my work day, I'm excited to start playing with lil Russet. It gives me some extra motivation to get my work done at school efficiently, so I can come home and play tug of war or chase him around. He is getting faster and stronger every day, and I love watching him run around and around in circles. The cutest thing is watching him run around on the hardwood - he has no traction and he wipes out just about every time he makes a turn. Time really does fly when I'm home with the puppy.
I've also cleaned up more dog poop in the last week than in the past 6 years combined. The cute little guy is just figuring everything out, and he is only 13 weeks old, so he has very little bladder control, and he doesn't really know where to go. Cyd and I have focused on keeping our bathroom interactions with him positive, because it never does any good to associate going to the bathroom with negativity. Every time he squats in an inappropriate place, we try to scoop him up quickly and put him on some newspaper or take him outside. When he does go in a good place, we praise him and give him a treat. He jumps in the air when we praise him and is so excited that he did something good, and he has been a lot better about holding in his business.
Within a week he has started going to the newspaper by himself and getting used to the routine of outside bathroom breaks. I'm really happy to see the little guy learning, and the positive reinforcement seems to be working.
I of course shared the arrival of my new puppy with my classes, and used it as a metaphor for teaching in general. Middle schoolers are a lot like little puppies: tons of energy, always starved for interaction, clumsy, impulsive, and messy. They thrive on positive interactions and positive reinforcement, and often don't do well when they are disciplined. I've seen students shut down when I have disciplined them, and I know that they won't accomplish much else in the lesson if I come down too hard on them. On the other hand, if they are distracting other students, I don't have much of a choice to have some negative consequences.
I've been working hard to keep in mind the lessons I learn from training my puppy while I am training my classroom. I've started using a simple "class points" system, where the class can earn a point for exhibiting good behavior, and they can cash in those points for some free time at the end of class. I originally set the bar pretty high for students to earn points. I don't want to seem like a pushover, and I'm generally more lenient than other teachers. My principal and I were talking about it, however, and she likened it to training the puppy: whenever he does something good, we give him a kibble. Just like with the puppy, whenever the class is doing something good, I should give them a class point. So I started giving the class specific, measurable goals, and rewarding them with a point if they follow through. It is as simple as saying, "If the whole class can get out their books and open to the correct page in the next 20 seconds, I'll give you a class point." It motivates the students to regulate each other, which is a stronger motivation than the teacher just repeating the page number. I had one class cash in their points this week, and a student said, "Mr. Maurer gave us 5 minutes to talk at the end of class, and it was awesome!" Hopefully we can keep going on that trajectory.
The other half of training is setting limits. You cannot achieve discipline just with positive reinforcement because it is natural for humans (and puppies) to test their limits. When I take Russet outside to use the bathroom, I always put the leash on him, so he knows it isn't play time. If I let him outside with no leash, he would run circles at 100 mph, get lost in the leaves, and get so distracted with playing that he never takes care of business. When I control him with the leash, he knows its not play time, but potty time.
I'm still working on setting good limits for my class. Classroom management is by far the hardest part of teaching for me. It doesn't come naturally to my personality, and I don't normally command people to do anything or directly criticize their behavior. I can't just put a leash on my troublesome students (or can I?), no matter how much I might want to in a given day. My class points system has been producing results for the whole class, but I'm not happy with my individual student behavior management. Does anyone have simple, positive, consistent ideas for dealing with "that one kid?" Something that I can take into the classroom on Monday? I'd really appreciate it.
One more puppy pic, just for good measure
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