Harder than it looks

I have been observing in my class for two weeks now (minus the two snow days) and it has been overwhelming, exciting, tiring, challenging, fun, heartwarming and scary. I am very fortunate to have an awesome teacher who does a great job of classroom management and is constantly assessing the students and herself to improve the job she is doing and make sure that the students are mastering the concepts she is teaching them.
            The mornings start with the lights dimmed and soft classical music playing in the background. On the PowerPoint she lists the morning routine and students file in quietly and start on their morning tasks. She says it is important to set the right tone from the beginning.
            Mrs. Morris has procedures in place and students know those procedures. After Christmas break she decided that transitions were taking too long so she had a class discussion to see how this could be improved. Together the class determined that a reasonable transition time from one subject to the next and from carpet time to desk time was less than one minute and 30 seconds. Next they set a goal of achieving a 1 minute and 30 second QUIET transition time at least 20 times in four days. Friday was a day when students were going to swap books (this was planned for the Friday before Christmas break but was snowed out). Together the class decided that their reward for achieving their goal would be the opportunity to bring a soda from home to drink during the book swap. The result was happy students that Friday and much better transition times that led to more learning time. This was a great example of showing the students that she is “the final authority while allowing them to feel that the classroom belongs to them as does the responsibility for their learning (Mack-Kirschner, pg. 10).”
            After almost two weeks of seeing Mrs. Morris make it look easy I start thinking I have a grasp on this classroom management stuff, after all I’ve read six chapters of the Love and Logic book as well as Harry Wong’s The First Days of School. How hard could it be? Well I found out today. The regular classroom teacher was out in the afternoon and it was just me and the substitute. I noticed a low hum of chatter in the class that wasn’t there before and suddenly our transitions were louder and longer than I had ever seen them in my whole two weeks. Next came the meltdown of “Bob” the student with emotional and behavioral issues who decided that I did not know how to do long division and that was not how Mrs. Morris had taught him. I was wrong and he wasn’t going to listen to me. My mind was reeling with all the information I had read but at the time I couldn’t grasp just the best way to address the issue. Looking back now I could have empathized with him while still giving him the consequences (Love and Logic, pg. 37) but at the time I was just trying not to show the anger that was welling up inside of me. All  parties survived the episode but I now see some of the mistakes that I made. I guess that is what student teaching is all about.