I’ve never actually seen this movie, but the trailer alone makes me want to plug it. It just got released on DVD (and added to my netflix list), and from what I can see in the trailer, it’s a loving and hilarious peek into what it’s like to be a new (and young) teacher.

You can order the DVD here: http://www.chalkthefilm.com/#/dvd/

I actually caught myself saying, “That’s highly inappropriate!” the other day, while listening to another teacher unload about his day.

“I mean, I wrote him up!” Seeing those words spoken in that trailer really reminds me how futile the “write up” is, at least at my school. Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to teach at a school that had meaningful consequences. Suspension just doesn’t work for students who would rather be at home anyway, who feel like they don’t have anything to lose by getting suspended.

I really resent all the times my faculty have been told, “When you need to have an administrator handle your discipline problems for you, you’ve lost authority in your classroom.” Another good one is, “You should not be relying on a dean to do your job for you!” As hard as it is for the school to create meaningful consequences, it is even harder for the classroom teacher, who, through whatever breakdown in communication between the “write up” and the astronomically overworked dean (of discipline) , doesn’t even have suspension as a last resort, to establish meaningful consequences and use them effectively. That snarky piece of wisdom is not what a first year teacher needs to hear, especially not in response to a cry for help in the emotionally exhausting (and often generally baffling) realm of classroom discipline.

However, there is absolutely truth in that statement. It means something totally different to send a piece of paper off to an office (where the time it takes to file and process makes any resulting punishment) than it does to call a parent yourself (if you have the time), or even just speak to the student after class. I’m often amazed at how effective this is. It’s like I forget. In fact, I do forget. I forget to ask Back Talking Student to stay for a moment at the end of class because at the end of class I am frantically trying to make sure all the students get the homework, or she slips out the back while I am making sure all the calculators have not been robbed of their batteries before class is dismissed and before I think to call her back.

But when I remember, it feels really good. I’m not saying it works. I’m not saying the student will behave, but it does something. On Thursday I asked Spitfire McBacktalk herself to stay after. She was reluctant at first, but ultimately stayed, and I just asked her, “What the heck happened today?” (It was a rhetorical question: we had gotten into a very loud–on her part–tiff when I asked her and several other students to quiet down, but she only heard her own name being called… because she had been talking too loudly to hear me say the other students’ names.) She gave me an embarrassed look, the look I’m sure parents wish they could receive after their three year old has finished his temper tantrum in the aisle of the grocery store, and we had a little moment. On the one hand, oh, whatever, she came in the next day out of dress code and threw another temper tantrum about how she wasn’t going to put her shirt on. But on the other hand, that conversation was six times more effective than another sheet of paper in a folder in the dean’s office would be. (Not to say the sheet of paper won’ t end up their too, but now it’s just follow up, not the great white hope for discipline.) And on that same hand, we were on peaceful terms when she left the classroom, which, call me a hippie, is better than the alternative.

I went to the biggest time waster of a professional development on classroom management two summers ago, and the nugget that I took from those many hours surrounded by other teachers with bad classroom management was that it doesn’t matter what that you can never give up. You may not have to power to suspend. Hell, you may not even be able to remove a student who is out of control and cursing at you or threatening you because there is some bigger crisis going on somewhere else in the school at the same time. But you can’t let it go. You have to do something. If a student refuses to stay after class, track them down during your next free period and pull them out of their class for two minutes. Even if they roll their eyes the whole time, and even if it is clear that they really don’t give a rat’s ass what you are saying, at least you demonstrated that SOMETHING happened as a result of their bad behavior, that you cared enough not to let it go.