The year I taught here a dozen years ago, I sucked at discipline. It was a Catholic high school for mostly poor boys from all over town. I was between editing jobs and I said yeah I’ll do it when the head of the English department asked me to take over for a guy who couldn’t control the class. This was October.
I loved the kids. They loved me. I knew as much about basketball as they did. But they still took advantage of me. They’d sleep, screw around. I have no instincts for discipline. They knew.
I tried to get their attention by finding good stuff for them to read. Most of them needed to learn to read a lot better than they did. I brought in stacks of paperbacks and magazines and loaded mail bins with them. It was the classroom I’d have wanted when I was their age. It worked, I think. Sometimes.
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