Out of college, I applied to the Bentley school to teach. A new high school, about to go into its fourth year and it needed a physics teacher.

I did not get that job (though I would a year later)

In early August, they suddenly had a math opening. I called them up, and explained that I could teach high school math just fine as a physics major. They were excited, not because of me, but because they could hire anyone on August 8th and especially because they had already done the full suite of interviews from my prior attempt at the physics position.

My position was multivariable calculus (three students), honors precalculus, two sections of precalculus, and advising (and coaching volleyball, and student activities, and scheduling). They were not shy about asking me to do more.

Honors precalc was a classroom management challenge. All of the students in that class were the same as the prior year when they were in Honors Algebra 2 (with the teacher who quit in August). They had developed a culture, they thought it was hilarious and they did not want to stop and they weren’t going to let a 22-year-old ruin all the fun.

We did build a new culture over time, it wasn’t great but it was far better than where it started. I never went to teacher-school but I imagine if I did, I would not have had a class on what to do when Danny randomly does raptor impressions (yes, the dinosaur from Jurassic Park) sometimes when you start writing on the board or how to handle an apparent game that some of your students play where they spank each other as hard as they can if they see an opening. How many inappropriate comments between students do you call out per class period? What if addressing all of them was your entire class period?

What do you do if one of your students thinks tennis player Marat Safin is hot and puts up his picture and bio all over your classroom while you are eating lunch?

That one I had an answer for, the next day her locker had a few of these on it:

The thing about a boisterous class is that if you listen, you pick up on quite a bit about them. It became pretty obvious that they were huge survivor fans (the reality TV show that had just launched). We started playing honors precalculus survivor with a tribal counsel at the end of the week. I set some ground rules as to whether everyone wanted to do this (it could easily go sideways) and we had tribal counsels at the end of the week. The four most rowdy kids were outnumbered by the ones who just wanted to learn math so the tribes worked themselves out.

After a couple of tribal counsels, it became a tool for classroom management. I set aside a part of my classroom board that I ceremonially erased every Monday and the class got three strikes. If they made it to Friday with less than three we would do tribal counsel. If not, they’d have to wait until the following week.

It worked, invariably, they would get two strikes before Wednesday and then the rowdy four survivor fans would keep each other in line so we could do tribal counsel again. It was a perfect consequence because I didn’t care about the game, it really didn’t do anything harmful for them to lose that and it mattered the most to the students that needed the most corrections.

Most of those students were in physics with me the following year, some had three years in my classroom. I even wrote college recs for a few of them. And it was really hard in the beginning and remains the most difficult classroom management scenario that I have ever been in.