Is the Teacher Fair?

6th Period Totals: 11 yes, 5 no, 2 maybe

So...I feel pretty comfortable with these numbers. If everyone thought I was fair, that would probably mean that i didn’t discipline anyone ever, especially when it comes to 7th graders. I pretty much expected that some kids would say I’m unfair, maybe because they really do think I’m unfair. Or maybe because they’re in 7th grade and they think more with their emotions than their precious little brains. Either, way i still feel pretty good about this ratio.

If anything, I would say that perhaps I am too forgiving and slightly unfair as a result of being forgiving, and then (after becoming increasingly angry) laying down the law pretty harshly. I’m pretty much the queen of the severity clause. If I actually decide to issue you a consequence, 9/10 times it should’ve been done 4 incidents ago, so I tend to skip to the consequence they should have at that point, rather than working my way back down the consequence ladder. It’s not as if I don’t address issues until they annoy the crap out of me, I do address them, I’m just bad at issuing a consequence in response. Because of this, I’ve starting telling my students that if I have to say their name more than three times they automatically get X consequence. This cuts down on paper work (writing assignments are a pain in the behind) and makes it easier to address students who misbehave regularly. This seems to work, because in most of my students are usually consistently well-behaved or consistently misbehaved. The well-behaved students will respond after the first name-warning, and the misbehaved ones get 2 chances to behave (although they rarely take opportunity of this). I’ve also started attaching mini-contracts to my writing assignments which say that if the student breaks the rules again, they can receive a more severe consequence. I gave out about 30 of these one week, and now I don’t have to anymore because they agreed (even if they didn’t know it, because they didn’t read what they signed) that they could be issued isolated break simply for talking in class. So, overall, I’ve made a pretty good effort to make my rules/ consequences work for my style of teaching and hopefully be pretty fair.