The metamorphos of chairs

I went in before the first day of school and moved 18 tables and chairs into my class. I had been told that for the first week I could expect around 5 students. I wanted my classroom to have a community feeling to it so I put the tables in a U shape. This was so that they could all see, but they could not talk to each other. When 25 turned up my U became more like a cresent moon with a milky way of stars shooting off in all directions as I frantically searched for more chairs. Because of the flooding that had cut off the town, and an ordering bungle, there wasn’t enough furnature in the school so students had to share chairs, and write in the same books, bumping each others elbows as they did so.

For the first three weeks the students would jump over tables, climb under them, hide in corners or run out the door. Trying to get them to sit in their seats for a lesson was impossible and I held no hope of changing this any time soon.

I tried giving them all a chart with their names on it and if they behaved they got a sticker. If they got 5 stickers they got a prize. It worked for 2 hours. By the end of it they had stolen each others stickers, taken their own stickers off to stick to their eye lids, or they had discovered my stash of stickers and gone around adding stickers to every chart.

So I tried something new. I made my milky way into ordered rows. I printed and laminted name cards and stuck them to tables and students had to sit where their name was. This was to separate trouble students and get some continuity in the class. It worked until recess, where they scraped their name tags off and placed them where they wanted to sit.

I tried points for the rows that were behaving the best, and not removing their labels. This worked for a whole day, but when the next day dawned, the half of the class that had been absent the day before came to school, and had no where to sit, and the half that had been there didn’t come so they ended up sitting anywhere they wanted. I persevered for a week and had little success.

Then I tried another method. If they got out of their seat for any reason without asking, they got a cross by their name. If they got 3 crosses they would have to stay in at recess. For the first 3 days, most of the class missed part of their recess. Then the numbers staying in began to dwindle, and eventually there were only a couple.

Then one morning, after all my fiddling with seating and stressing about behaviour management the fever broke. They sat down, they listened and they did a little bit of work. I let all of them out on time for their recess and I walked out to do lunch duty. There were tears in the corner of my eyes as I made my way into the play ground and Bec came up and asked if I was ok. I stumbled for words. ‘They sat’ I managed to stutter. I didn’t know what to do with myself. All I could think was that if they manage to learn how to sit, imagine how much they could learn.

And that was how things began to change.