Here are some of the lessons I've learned about teaching English in Korea since I got here:
1. Classroom discipline is not an exact science. It's impossible to think that things will go swimmingly 100% of the time. Some days, the students are just bad no matter what consequences you affix to their actions.
2. In order to maintain classroom discipline you must go in with the presumption that you hold the control and have all the power. Classroom discipline is you figuring out the most effective way to use it. If you let students have any power they're going to walk all over you and you will be left frustrated and stewing with anger inside.
3. You cannot come up with a long list of rules and expect students to follow all of them all the time. Start small. Have very simple, broad rules and be unswerving with them. For example, when I made rules I came up with 10. Students were breaking them left, right, and center at first and there was literally no way that I could catch every infraction and apply the punishment I installed. Students picked up on this and saw it as a game of risk. Would I catch THEIR violation or miss it in favor of someone else's. You overwhelm yourself when you come up with more than 2 or 3 rules and at the end of the day you feel completely inconsistent. And you ARE inconsistent if you don't punish all of them. So start small with only a couple of rock solid rules and punish the violators without mercy.
4. Find something that the students care about and you find your power source. For instance, in most of my classes, they care about getting stamps that they can exchange for coupons. But in some of my classes they could care less about getting stamps. So I had to find something else that they DID care about.
5. Have both punishment and positive reinforcement in place. It's the same in God's economy. Students will either be punished for disobedience or rewarded for obedience. Under no circumstances will absolutely nothing happen. This way, the students will not see you as either a softy or a cruel dictator in the classroom. Those who are punished cannot accuse you of being mean and those who are rewarded cannot form the opinion that they can get away with things behind your back.
6. Don't take disobedience personally. The students want to get under your skin and they often will but you MUST not show it. Treat them as though you could care less how they behave and simply apply the reward or the punishment previously decided to the situation. If they see that they are getting under your skin it will simply make things worse. You must not allow them to affect your personal life. At the end of the day, some students are just rotten. They are rotten to you on top of all the others. Don't take it personally.
7. You're never going to have it perfect. At least not for the first long while. Students are students. They are in your classroom with 2 duties: learning and being students. Contrary to what people may tell you, these are not the same things. Every teacher I know wishes their class came with only the first duty but it's just not that way. Being a student means being a person and whenever you put more than 1 sinner in a room there are going to be social problems. We just have to deal with it!
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