I needed photographic evidence to demonstrate the weirdness in this room this year.
Doesn't this hurt?
It started with kneeling on the chairs. Then kids started squatting on them. I lost track of how many times a day I had to say, “How do you sit on a chair?
How do you not know how to use a hanger?
This is the new way to use a hanger. And then in the winter, use the tiny tab by the size tag to hang your winter coat on this thing, too. Be sure to get mad when your stuff falls on the floor (Or Ms. Institutrice throws it there). If the hook breaks, throw away the hanger because it is broken.
Why am I teaching kids how to use a hanger?
Comb much?
I know I used this picture before, but I still can’t get over how many kids don’t even comb their hair before coming to school. For some, this explains the quality of their work!
Expensive Cootie Catchers
These Cootie Catchers are made from Post-It notes. And they all came from the same student. What a waste of money!
I have to say, I truly did not understand the kids in this class. They are WEIRD.
I think it’s because they are so socially inept. There is no social “norm” anymore so how is anyone to teach the “correct” way to do anything. It’s like fashion. Fashion is just a Hodge Podge of whatever and whichever. The world is melting pot and no one knows how to handle it or even cope with it.
That makes sense. And really, it’s not even an issue of “correct” so much as they make things difficult for themselves. It takes them forever to get their backpack on the hanger like that, and then when they put it in the coatcloset, it falls off or knocks off someone else’s. They get all aggravated and sigh, and waste more time putting it back on the hanger this way. I showed them the “correct” way as an easier way (less time, less aggravation), but that did not register, even though they were like, “Oh!” All the weird things they do just make things more difficult.
Are there hooks for them to hang up their backpacks correctly?
Why is Ms. Institutrice throwing students’ stuff on the floor?
What is wrong with sitting in Japanese formal position on a chair? (OK, the shoes should be off, and the right foot horizontal like the left foot is.) Surely Ms. Institurice has more important things to worry about than kids who prefer a different sitting position than hers!
If the kid bicycled to school, his hair may have been combed before he put his helmet on and still look like that during school.
Nope, no hooks. And there wouldn’t be hangers if I didn’t buy them. When they leave the bags on the floor, they spill out of the closet, and people trip (especially me). There isn’t enough room for them to hang them on the back of their chairs, and that only leads to the temptation to play with stuff in it.
The bags fall on the floor and into the walkway. Kids have fallen when they trip over them, and I have tripped many a times. I used to put them by the trash can (if you leave your stuff on the floor, you obviously don’t want it), til a kid’s jacket supposedly got spit on and his mom threatened to send her husband to school to beat me up. (Even though his fourth grade teacher did the same exact thing – unbeknownst to me, and his coat was in the trash can every day because he would leave it in the middle of the floor.)
Is Japanese-style like sitting cross-legged? That would be okay if their butt is on the chair. But they like to perch. When they fall and crack their head open, who gets in trouble?
Our students are not allowed to ride their bikes to school. There are no bike racks. I’m not sure why.
Japanese formal sitting style is not cross legged, but close to a kneeling position.
The Wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seiza explains it and has one picture. Some kids learn it in martial arts classes, particularly aikido and kendo classes.
There are lots of images and videos on the web of it—you can google for “seiza” (which literally translates to “proper sitting”).
Since the kid in your picture is not properly sitting in seiza, I don’t really believe that was what was intended. My point was just that what is “correct” sitting is awfully arbitrary, and that any non-disruptive posture should be acceptable (except in special circumstances, when attention to the body is the point of the lesson—martial arts, acting, PE, ergonomics, …). So safety rules, like keeping feet out of the aisle and not tipping chairs back on two legs are important to enforce, but questions of sitting style are not really useful focuses for teacher attention.
If the kids are hurting themselves with bad posture (possible, but perhaps unavoidable with the badly fitting chairs that are all most schools can afford to provide), it may be worth doing a lesson on ergonomics—teaching posture for typing and writing with emphasis on avoiding repetitive stress injuries, back problems, and neck problems. The kids may be more receptive to a “here’s how to take care of yourself” message than to a “do things my way” message. It could backfire, though, since the kids can then end up pointing out that the chairs they are forced to sit on are the wrong sizes for them (almost certainly the case for half the class, given the large variation in leg lengths and the small variation in chair sizes in the typical classroom). An activist teacher would then arrange for chair swaps between classrooms and kids getting seats of the right sizes, but I doubt you want to go there.
It sounds like your classroom does indeed have a backpack problem. Does your school have a parent-volunteer work day at the beginning of the school year? (All the schools my son has gone to had that tradition.) If so, you could buy a bunch of coat hooks and wall anchors at the hardware store (or even ask the hardware store if they are willing to donate them to the school) and have the parents put them up. If the walls are not suitable for directly attaching hooks (cement block or flimsy sheetrock), you may want get wooden boards to attach the hooks to, then attach the boards to the wall. This would make the setup easier to move if you ended up getting assigned a different classroom or a different grade level, also.
Having a place to hang the packs could reduce the aggravation a lot. Whether it is better to have students have assigned hooks or make them first-come-first-served depends on the kids. If you only have one set of kids with backpacks in the room, then letting the kids put their names on paper above the hooks might help them remember to use them. If you have different kids every period, then numbered hooks may be a better way to do the assignment.
[...] September 3, 2009 by institutrice These first three days just FLEW by. A kid even commented on how fast the day was going, and he still couldn’t believe he is in the fifth grade. (This is the same boy who complimented my idea of hanging the backpacks on the hangers so they wouldn’t get stepped on because something of his got broken before from being on the floor. I love him already! What a difference from the kids last year who didn’t even know how to use a hanger!!!) [...]