This comes from my Summer teaching at Lexington Children's Theater back in 2010. I had never taught before that Summer and it was also my first professional internship. We had cleared our way through six out of ten weeks of classes when disaster finally struck. The only way we could survive was quick thinking and powerfully efficient teamwork.
Let me start with a little more background. Lexington Children's Theater employs education interns every Summer to teach their robust load of Summer classes. That year we had 11 teaching artists champing at the bit to get in their and educate some young minds. The way the program worked, however, was that every class had at least two teachers who acted as equals in order to devise a performance with the young people in their classes that week. Because there were so many of us, we would occasionally have to stuff three co-teachers into a classroom and have them figure out how to divide the work.
The week I want to talk about was one of those three person weeks. "But Edd, how can anything go wrong when you've got three teachers?" you may ask. "The authority of three meager educators is no match for the wrath of a four year old," I reply. We were working on devising a sharing for Go Dog, Go! and pretending to drive around the room and honk our pretend horns. I was leading this exercise and I saw that one of my co-teachers had stopped to talk with one of the little girls in our class. I wasn't particularly surprised because I had seen that she (let's call her Anna) was having a tough day earlier.
It was the third day of class, and for the first time Anna had cried when her father left her in class. I was pretty used to seeing kids being upset in the first moments of their parents leaving, it only makes sense when you're teaching a group of 16-20 four and five year olds. Usually by the third day, however, they have shaken the jitters out and they can't wait for their parents to leave so we can get to having fun. Anna didn't get the memo that she was supposed to have fun that day, it was easy to tell from the surly pout spread across her face and her little arms crossed over her chest.
Anyway, I figure my co-teacher can handle it. We're well practiced at calming upset students at this point and I figure Anna just needs to sit out for a moment and then she'll be ready to come back in. I'm letting kids tell us how we should drive around (like a squid! like a butterfly! etc.) and after a couple turns I notice that not only has my second co-teacher gone to help the first, but Anna has not budged. She also seems to be getting angrier. She's stomping her feet and shouting and outright refusing to do any thing that a teacher asks of her. I privately wished I could go help them soothe the savage Anna, but we had a class to be led and I was the one left in charge.
Now typically we try to get students who are throwing a tantrum away from the rest of the class. That way they won't affect the flow of whatever you're doing and you'll give them time to calm down. Students see one of their friends upset and the wheels basically start to fall off. "What's wrong with Anna? Why's she mad?" become the only things that matter to anybody (which is very sweet, when you think about it). Being that Anna wasn't budging and every time my co-teachers tried to nudge her towards the door she would violently and furiously resist, I decided we had to take our class on the road.
I had us quietly drive our whale-cars out of the classroom in a nice little line and we explored a "magic hallway" for about five minutes. I peeked back into the class and still saw the first co-teacher struggling with Anna, who was now running from her and occasionally dropping to her back and kicking the air wildly. My second co-teacher had rejoined me and I passed the reigns to her as best I could and I went into the classroom. I didn't go to Anna, if another teacher couldn't calm her after eight minutes then we needed someone with even more authority than us. I called in the big guns, I called in Miss Amie.
"Miss Amie" was one of the two people who was directly in charge of the education program at Lexington Children's Theater at the time. She'd been teaching for a long time and I don't know that I've ever met anybody who worked better with young people. She was silly when the classes were well behaved, but she took zero tantrum nonsense. She was down to our room in moments and after about 30 seconds she got Anna to go out into the hallway more or less of her own volition. Then later on, she had Anna join her in the office for the rest of our class time.
I hadn't seen a student pitch such a powerful fit before that and I haven't seen one since then. I was really focused on the things I was doing, so please excuse the lack of detail in what my co-teachers were accomplishing. I had a difficult task in keeping our class's attention, but they had an impossible task in calming Anna down. Funnily enough, I saw Anna later on in the day and she was sitting happy as ever up in our office. I asked her what had happened and she shrugged and said, "I just got mad. I had a bad day." How's that for honesty!
Have you had any experiences with students that seemed impossible to navigate at the time? How'd you get through it? Did you have to call in "the big guns?"
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