Dealing with Really Bad Students, part 3

Hello Everyone,

OK, so you've identified your troublemaker, and you've accurately assessed what is wrong. What do you do next?

I recommend having an individual contract with the student.

It may be formal, which it implies, but it is just as effective being informal if you can remember the conditions.

Let's propose a few hypothetical situations over the next few days. Here's today's:

1. A young man has been acting up severely in your class. You have found out that his father is an alcoholic, his mother has been abused (he has not), and he has had a long history of anger issues, including shouting out obscenities in class. He does not have an IEP. Sending him to the deans has not changed his behavior. Everyone else in your class is doing pretty well, and he is your only severe management difficulty, though he is able to get the entire class in an uproar. He has been sent to the school psychologist already; he is diagnosed ADHD, but he can't take his medication because it makes him violent.

What do you do?

First, do NOT try to give him therapy; that is best left to the professionals.

If he is willing to talk to you, give him opportunities outside class to talk. Do not judge him or his family; just listen. If he needs to hear sympathetic sounds, give them.

If he is not willing to talk to you, make sure that he has someone that he can talk to.

I believe that you may be frank with such students, once they trust you. Say something like, "Look, I know that you are having anger issues. The problem I have is that the combination of your anger and your ADHD are making the class hard to manage. How can we work this out so that I don't have to send you to the deans, and you don't have to be in trouble, and I can still manage my class?"

Listen, and, as much as is reasonably possible, work it out so that the student can establish his own behavioral criteria in class. He should be able to give you a signal if he's having a really bad day at home, so you know not to push him too much. He should be able to give you specific criteria to follow before you kick him out completely. You could work out something that will help him calm down.

Additionally, find appropriate ways to let him shine. If he has a specific talent, let him use it in the classroom. If he is a performer (many of them are), let him perform for a grade some time.

This hypothetical is true, except for some details that are changed to simplify it or to cover up identities. The approach worked.

I did not give the student a good grade. He knew that his grade was mostly unrelated to his behavior. He passed, though, and we remain friends. He eventually stopped driving the rest of his class crazy, and he always knew he could talk with an adult about something. (He maintained all his old friends, and he did not reveal all his innermost secrets to me; I didn't want that any more than he did. He just learned to trust that there were some things that an adult could understand.)

We did not write the contract down, but he remembered what it was.

Jeff Combe