The Art of Compromise

The biggest shift in my perspective of teaching came from asking "how" instead of "why"? When I asked myself why the kids are the way they are, why they don't do their homework, or why they aren't afraid of me, all it amounted to was a useless amount of hair pulling and eyeball gouging. But when I ask myself how I can get them to do their homework or how I can get them to follow the rules, that's when actual results start appearing. 

Simultaneously, I find myself giving students much more leeway than I ever thought I would. 

• I give them 15 min of class time to do their homework instead of quipping, "It's called HOMEwork for a reason!" 
• Instead of furiously lecturing to a room full of bored students when they fail to read a single chapter of a novel, I type that chapter into a script so that they can act it out with a partner.
•  I've resorted to Pavlovian conditioning as I play Black Eyed Peas' "Let's get it started" at the beginning of an activity to signal that they should be properly arranging their chairs into a circle and the "Mission Impossible" theme song in the end to indicate that they should be cleaning up. They robotically set up and clean at the drop of these songs without me having to utter a word.
• I've accepted the fact that I have a room full of hormonal, amazingly chatty, and brazenly flirtatious 7th graders, and so I now let them discuss answers to grammar exercises, journal entries, a story's summary...basically anything remotely discussable. 
  

It certainly wasn't the way that I was taught, and sometimes I am embarrassed to share the tactics I've resorted to. I'm still clueless when it comes to answering all the hows, but what I can confidently say is that this job is never dull, and for that I am grateful.