Again, I feel more compassion for your son than for 95% of the majors in the
Army. Hopefully he's going into a nice, uniformed, gender segregated,
Catholic
middle class, middle school where every parent attends every PTSA meeting,
fully supports the school, and mandates homework completion for their
children.

Tell him to get in touch. I'll give him some tips. The first will be to
provide
a "Help Line" for the kids. More later if interested.

John H

On the 'Poco Loco' out of Deale, MD,
on the beautiful Chesapeake Bay!


Actually, he's teaching in a public school in a lower middle class
neighborhood. A lot of these kids have very few real advantages in life, many
are from homes with revolving Dads, etc.

He's already been through a baptism of fire.

His student teaching last fall was a ridiculous experience. He taught three
classes a day. One of the classes had 50 kids, and 18 of them were on
"special individualized learning" programs.
(State law says there aren't supposed to be more than a handful of these
academically challneged kids in a class at any one time). The "instructing"
teacher spent no time in the classroom after the first week or so of the
semester, and was hiding out in the teachers' lounge. My son spent a lot of
time every day trying to keep discipline in that class, with mixed results.
Some of the kids would simply, and literally say, "**** You" when he'd ask them
to sit down. He was frustrated by that class, and took some heat from the
school's principal over the number of kids he was sending to the office every
day. A couple of them ultimately got kicked out of school entirely over
behavior in that class, and in one case my son was threatened by an angry
parent who was protesting his kid's expulsion.

I gave him a few tips that helped. One of the initial problems he had was
paperwad fights. The school had so much trouble with the stuff kids were
putting into thier lockers, that all the lockers had been welded shut and the
kids were carrying all their books and papers from class to class
in backpacks. (There was stuff in some of those backpacks that would have made
anything ever left in a locker look tame).
The kids would begin wadding up papers when they got to class, and throwing
them, like snowballs, around the room.

I suggested a new routine for the class, and it cured the paperwad fights. When
the kids came into the classroom, they piled all the books and papers not
needed for that class against the back wall. Each student was given *one* piece
of paper to take notes on, and the student had to write their name on the paper
before class began. When the first paperwad flew after this policy went into
effect, my son picked it up, unraveled it, and discovered (surprise) no name.
No big deal. There was
only one kid in that corner of the classroom *without* a piece of paper on his
desk. Busted. Paperwad fights were very rare after the change in paper policy.

He survived the class from hell. His other two classes, with a more normal
number and mix of students, went very well. I was half afraid he'd get washed
out because of all the trouble he was having in the almost-impossible class,
but he wound up with an "A minus" in student teaching which wasn't too bad, all
things considered.

For the last six months he's been substituting in middle schools in the same
district. Remember 8th grade? A substitute was fair game for all the krap you
ever wanted to do but were too smart or scared to pull on the teacher who
would be giving you your semester grade and talking to your parents on
conference night.

(You are in a unique situation to appreciate that)

It's doubtful that he'll have any worse experience than subbing through the
second semester and student teaching.

He can be a very effective teacher. When he was teaching the US Constitution to
college freshmen as a graduate student, the students in his section of that
class consistently outperformed the other two sections of the same class and
scored very well on exams. If he starts to flounder, I'll consider you a ready
resource. Thanks.