Behavioral Problems

Classroom management issues can be debilitating. When Monday rolls around, anticipating the arrival of a "difficult class" can rob your entire practice of a sense of joy. Of course, since there is no quality teaching without a sense of joy, the problem is compounded. If there is no colleague in the building to commiserate with, or no time to problem-solve classroom management issues, a bad situation can get worse.

How do we encourage young people to participate? How do we proceed when student behavior is disruptive? How can we transform our relationship to students so that classroom management is not about discipline?

In his book Encouraging Children to Learn, Rudolf Driekurs presents a radical re-thinking of our relationship to the concept of discipline. Instead of reward and punishment, he argues that children should be made aware of logical consequences for their behavior.

A radical idea.

In the news:

Detroit's unemployment rate nears 50%.

The number of people applying for Food Stamps is rising fast.

Uncertainty grows about whether the Imperial Senate will be able to pass a health care bill before 2010.

Goldman Sachs is having the best year ever!

Give It

In his Sunday column for the New York Times, Frank Rich says it's time to put aside the pursuit of money and do something good. Eventually, he gets around to chatting with Howard Gardner:

But it’s hardly a given that the entrenched money culture has evaporated along with the paper profits it generated. One skeptic is Howard Gardner, the Harvard education professor who has created seminars at several elite colleges to counsel students in the notion of pursuing meaningful, ethical and effective work — “Good Work,” as he has titled it. He believes that many students may still be operating on the assumption that the world of finance will just pick up where it left off in a few years. “But we’re not going to be back there,” Gardner told me last week, “and we shouldn’t be back there.”

Also, unemployment reached its highest level in 25 years.

Plus, Barbra - The Way We Were.

Run

The writing is on the wall for the economy and some of our colleagues in the field have already received their pink slips. As we look around for someone to blame there are so many choices.

Robert E. Rubin.

The New York Times says that Robert Rubin is leaving Citigroup because he "plans to deepen his involvement in public policy initiatives, charitable projects and personal hobbies like fly-fishing."

Do you know Robert E. Rubin? He's the guy that ran Citigroup into the ground while collecting $115 million dollars in just 9 short years.

Now, he is going to focus on his not for profit work.

Also: Gnarls Barkley (Run, I'm a Natural Disaster)