Establishing expectations

When the school year rolls around again, we all will be getting a new crop of students on the bus. Some of these will be riding on your bus for the first time due to graduation from elementary, junior high, middle school, etc. If early on they start misbehaving, and some surely will, I have had success in modifying their behavior by telling them that they are not on the little-kids bus anymore. Now they are on the big-kids bus and should behave accordingly. It establishes expectations that they will have to observe and learn from students in upper classes. Generally the older students are better behaved and are a good role model.

Road hog

Earlier in the year one of my second graders clearly demonstrated that second graders can be entertaining, even to the bus drivers on the school bus. They frequently entertain each other, which is why they often end up creating disrupting behavior on the bus. But this time the bus driver was the recipient of the entertainment. Johnny, who was sitting up front on the bus, exclaimed, “Here comes my mother, driving down the middle of the road as usual.” Sure enough a car was approaching from the other direction and was wobbling over the center line. Assuming his mother was on her way to work, I asked, “Johnny, what does your mother do?” His stoic reply effectively set me up as the straight man. He said, “She is a road hog.” Johnny spent the remainder of the trip to school wondering why what he said was so funny to his bus driver.

Creating a monster

I fear that I have created a monster. I mentioned in an earlier entry that upon request I returned to a student’s house one morning to retrieve something she forgot the first time she boarded the bus for school. Well, since then there has been a rash of daily requests from a variety of students to go back home to get something or another. Never more than one per day but it is clearly another one of those contagious events. Once you grant the first request it is hard not to honor subsequent requests without appearing to play favorites. I did deny one request as one that I thought unwarranted, but that is applying my set of judgments or ‘being judgmental’, as is the popular phrase today. I’ve never fully understood how being judgmental is all bad as that is something we all do all day every day but then there is a lot I don’t understand. At any rate I am going to have to figure out how to cut down, if not completely eliminate these return trips.

Harmless fun results in denial

A little girl got on my elementary bus this morning and immediately gained the attention of several of the students around her with a little pink hand held devise that I at first thought was a cell phone. Many of my older students have cell phones but not so many of the elementary students have them yet so I was somewhat intrigued. I observed all of this through the mirror but as no harm was being done except for one little boy who insisted on hanging out in the aisle, I didn’t say anything to her about it. The little boy was admonished as he left the bus because he didn’t heed my requests to stay out of the aisle, but that is not the point of the post so I will move on. On the afternoon bus ride home there was a resumption of interest being generated as with the morning ride so I became overwhelmed with curiosity. As she exited the bus to go home I asked her what it was that she had that was of so much interest to the other students. She said “Nothing, I don’t have anything”. Well, this is the same student that denied eating popcorn the week before. Her sister came up behind her and said “it’s a recorder”. At that point she pulled it from her hiding place and showed it to me. I said “Oh, you were recording their voice and playing it back for them. That’s OK”. It seems she is automatic with denial that she is guilty of anything, even if it is harmless fun. I’ll have to work harder to establish a positive rapport with this student.

Analyzing interpersonal dynamics

Analyzing interpersonal dynamics is a fancy name for trying to figure out how to reduce foolishness on a school bus. Some drivers permanently assign seats for their students and that’s where they are to sit every day. That seems a lot like permanent punitive measures, but what ever works. One way to analyze interpersonal dynamics is to move one or two students at a time on a daily basis and observe what effect this has on the general noise level on the bus. I did that today with a student who I suspected of lying to me last week regarding eating popcorn on the bus. So I had dual motivations since she is always in the middle of where the noise emanates. I thought it interesting that she didn’t even ask why I had her sit up front today. I’ll have to say, it did have a calming impact on the rest of the bus. An added benefit to assigning seats from time to time is that it serves as a reminder of who is in charge of the bus, and who is not.