My first full day at the new placement was spent attending a district-wide "in-service" day - basically, a mandatory conference - on Individual Education Programs, which is what students with disabilities are supposed to have during their school years, and the district's new behavior management strategy.
Having just completed a 14-week intensive course on teaching students with disabilities last semester, including reading the equivalent of two textbooks and taking an essay test every week with between five and eight questions, there wasn't much new material for me during the a.m. session. But the after-lunch behavior management program had a lot of good pointers, including the maxim that behavior management is not apart from teaching, but a part of teaching.
The most important pointer was given to me by the Social Studies teacher I was sitting next to, Mr. Y. He wrote me a note and pulled it out of his notebook:
"Show the kids you care. The rest will fall into place."
I hope he's right, because I do care . . . but things didn't exactly fall into place last semester, when the entire class pushed me out into the hallway in order to have an unobstructed view of a fight that had started in the classroom when I was with a substitute teacher instead of my mentor. Of course I was just an intern, only there a few times a week . . . but still . . .
This school doesn't have that kind of atmosphere - after all, even in my limited time at the other school I witnessed four fights besides "mine" - but I still want to talk to my mentor about it.
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