Teaching, you think, is a thing of rare beauty — until disaster strikes in a distressingly familiar form. The Class-Clown strike again!
The class clown can ruin the mood to learn, but with a little understanding and a riff of your own, you can stop these jokesters from bouncing off the walls.
There is nothing wrong with a class clown.
In fact, students gifted with a clever sense of humor can be a wonderful asset to your classroom.
They can be another ingredient in the mix that helps you create a learning environment students love being part of. The truth is,the most effective classrooms link is laugh. They laugh and joke and enjoy each other much more than most teachers realize. As long as it’s done within the confines of the class rules, humor should be encouraged and even led by the teacher.
It makes your ability to influence behavior that much stronger. But when a student steps outside those boundaries to deliver an ill-timed one-liner, it can have the opposite effect. It can pull the entire class off task. It can cause silliness and excitability. It can encourage others to do the same. It can also make the teacher feel as if it was done at their expense, especially if it happens during direct instruction.
After all, in one fell swoop a funny remark can undo the time and effort that went into creating a captivating lesson or engaging activity. It’s natural to be offended, to take it personally, to glare daggers in the student’s direction or cut them off with a biting rebuke.
But an angry reaction will only make matters worse. It will extend and deepen the interruption. It will bring stress and negativity into your classroom. It will ensure a slow return to focused work and cast a dark cloud over the rest of the day.
It will also put into motion an antagonistic relationship with the offending student. One that can be difficult to overcome. So, how should you handle it?
There is usually a long-suffering teacher attempting to keep him (or her) from disrupting the class. One of the keys to accomplishing this, many professionals now advise, is to resist the impulse to squelch the clownish behavior. Instead, they say, go with your gut: laugh. Given the most common underlying factors for in-class funny business, a good guffaw is possibly the best first step to reaching an understanding with the clown. Acting out may be the only way this kid can garner peer acceptance. Or, goofing off may cover up social insecurities or academic shortcomings. Frequently, too, a troubled home life gives impetus to the clown’s antics.
Curtailing the Clown: How to Muzzle Mischief Makers
Here’s a guide to handling the humorists in your classroom, fromYou Can Handle Them All.
Symptoms:
- Doesn’t know when to stop.
- Has a smart-aleck response for everything.
- May enjoy the attention of being reprimanded.
- Actually quite funny at times.
- Usually emotionally immature.
- Bothers other students with touching and grabbing.
- Not really a leader; may actually be a loner.
- Feeling that the class clown is out to bug the teacher.
- Having two standards of expectations and allowances — one for the class clown and one for other students.
- Ignoring the problem.
- Issuing threats that can’t be carried out.
- Isolating the student physically in order to stop the problem.
- Failing to realize that his/her humor is not a negative human characteristic.
- Don’t ignore this student. His or her personality and needs will not allow it.
- The class clown is often funny, but knowing when to quit is the problem. Therefore, signal by hand movement, rather than words, that enough is enough.
- In a private conference, use the Time and Place strategy.
- Respond with silence. In a powerful way, this response gets the student to settle down.
- Use the Mature Class technique. Explain that a teacher would like to be able to have fun with the class but that a teacher can do this only if the class is mature enough to sense the right time and place for humor.
- Don’t attempt to handle this student with anger, rejection, or sarcasm, and don’t try to outwit this student. Such attempts will fail.
Teacher Mistakes:
Appropriate Action:
But, as every teacher knows, there are times when even such an enlightened approach isn’t enough to make the clown manageable. When the inappropriate behavior persists, savvy educators have learned to look at a student’s domestic situation for clues, and respond with care.
“With a class clown, you almost always find something deeper going on, and our job is to figure out what’s pushing them that way,” says Margie Schwartz, counselor at Marin Country Day School, a K-8 private school in Corte Madera, California.
“Often, it’s anxiety and stress coming from the home,” Schwartz adds. “In alcoholic families, for instance, kids take on different roles — be it the scapegoat, caretaker, or clown — and if they are being validated in that role, then they bring it to school, where they suck up all the energy in the class and deprive others of quality learning time.”
It’s at this point, says Rao, that a teacher must take on the role of gatekeeper, guiding the student to counseling or therapy. “The wiring of these kids is very sensitive, and when there’s dysfunction in the family, they internalize it and often blame themselves,” he adds. “So they try to compensate in the healthiest way they know, through creative humor. Since it’s often beyond the teacher’s wherewithal to encourage them while maintaining the class, therapy becomes the best route.”
Because class clowns are so often grouped in the bright-but challenging category, the question of what life holds for them is especially intriguing. Will they be able to trade on their exhibitionistic talents to succeed as adults, or does their innate disruptiveness condemn them to a troubled existence?
Seeman, who runs a Web site calledClassroom Management Online, is sanguine about the prospects of schoolroom jokesters. “Often, the clown’s talent is a transferable skill to legitimate walks of life such as sales or entertainment,” he says. “If the teacher is able to channel this ability, and curb it when the timing is inappropriate, it can be useful.”
Don’t frown. Don’t tense. Don’t even sigh. Just stand in place and wait for the moment to pass. Wait for movement to cease. Wait for silence to be restored. Let the weight of disrupting the sacredness of teaching and learning in your classroom dawn on the offending student. Let them realize of their own accord that they just interrupted, disrespectfully, the teacher they like and admire.
Let the entirety of the moment hang in the air as a message to every student. You see, when you let the elephant in the room just stand there, alone and awkward and shuffling its feet, the lesson becomespowerful and meaningfulto everyone in the class. But especially to the offending student, whose witty quip now rings hollow and absurdly out of place.
When the moment is right—and you’ll know when—calmly take a step or two toward the student, deliver your consequence matter-of-factly, then turn and get on with your lesson.
In this way, you safeguard your relationship with the disruptive student. You restore, and even increase, respect for you. And you all but remove the chances of it happening again. In less than 60 seconds you’re back to work.
As if it never happened.
References:
http://www.edutopia.org/clowning-around
By: Mr. Ulysses Gabriel | Teacher III | Sta. Isabel Elementary School | Dinalupihan, Bataan
