Yesterday I practiced tough love in my classes.  Tough love is preferable to teacher meltdown day, another teaching mode I utilize from time-to-time, though it has a much uglier aspect.

No, tough love day is about simply assessing the situation and acting with firm, bold, pleasant strokes and then continuing onward with such.

Last week, I held conferences.  I only saw over one-third of my students that week, those who did not have to sit in my office and go over all their work were given a get out of jail free card.  For that hour and a half, they were able to roam the universe and not deal with me, writing, or their essays.  I didn't see some of them for the whole week.  But I asked all of my students--those who had a conference and those who did not--to buy the new book and continue to follow the syllabus, meaning, they had to come in having read two stories from Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri.

It was not without surprise, though, that I found myself looking out at my first class of the day, noticing that close to a third of them did not have the book.  After talking and then lecturing a bit about short fiction, I calmly asked those without a book to leave the room. 

They stared back at me.  I smiled, waited, waited some more.  They pulled together their things, and filed out.  Then for the rest of the class period, the the students with books and I worked together on the stories.

In the next two classes, the same condition arose.  And I did the same thing.  No one melted down.  I didn't raise my voice or act inappropriately or call a student a vampire.  I'm sure those who left were irritated and annoyed, and I hope they were so all the way down to the bookstore.   But the class went on.  I taught, students learned (or at least appeared to).  It was a meltup day, not down.

When I'm able to respond to a situation in a calm way, assessing and then acting when I need to in a way that serves me and whomever I am with, I almost marvel.  I'm growing up, I think.  Finally.

Jessica