Simmer Down Now

"I'll wait,..........." I had asked my students to quiet down and was using some Love and Logic patience on them. As I sat looking out on an unaffected class, I began my flash back in time to a place where my classmates and I once ruled the room. We loved,.. no make that adored, teachers who allowed us to run things our way. Who wouldn't? We started class when we were ready, we ended it when we had enough (usually they were minutes apart). We even had the homework things down,..."We can't do homework tonight, there's a football game." And now,.. I had become my teachers. It's true what they say about things in education coming full circle. Like bell-bottom pants, I was living in the past.

The noise began to elevate and bodies started moving from their once stationary position seated behind a desk. I snapped my mind from my happy place back to the classroom. While it's true I was using Love and Logic rather than screaming from the top of my lungs EVERYBODY BE QUIET!,... I had the final part of my sentence to finish, the one that I had begun five minutes earlier,.. the ending to a sentence that would prove who was still in charge of the room,.. the ending to a sentence that would be considered the knock out punch in a prize fight,... "I'll wait for everyone to be quiet. What I don't cover in class today will be homework." BOOM, there it was! I laid out the end of a sentence with the calm of a storm before the worst is unleashed. Only I wasn't unleashing, I was calmified. I didn't need to repeat myself,... you really need just one kid to hear the word homework and you immediately have the numbers on your side.

Room established to order.