Kept In or Hey teachers leave those kids alone

The moment I started teaching I realised sadly that I was now on the opposite camp from the one I’d been as a student. No matter who we are and how vastly different from other teachers, in the students’ eyes we are authority figures to be respected and obeyed.

In the course of time, depending on our personalities   and circumstances, we forge our own relationships with our students and develop our own ways of dealing with all kinds of behaviour so as to facilitate the teaching process.

Trying to strike the correct balance between the concern for making the most of every single minute of my students’ time and allowing enough space for them to express themselves has always been my main preoccupation.

Teaching people – among other things – involves gaining people’s trust so that they will let down their guard and embark on that wonderful journey of knowledge which will benefit not only the students but the teachers as well as there is always a lot to be learnt from teaching different people with different attitudes to life.

Punishing students in various ways can result in them loathing the very people who should be their major prop –their teachers.

I have chosen a poem by Barbara Giles that focuses on the alienation children can feel and the resentment they harbour at being detained at school. The title of the poem is Kept In and the only slight adaptation I took the liberty to make is to turn the “lad” in the second stanza to a “girl”.

Here is a video I made to liven up the poem:

 https://drive.google.com/file/d/15AKPobASNxtTtnxFML7SezX8xW1EtARa/view?usp=sharing

After showing the slideshow, you could ask the students to replace the following lines with their own ideas preserving the rhyme if possible:

With a Ho and a Hoo

I could turn you all blue

and

With a flash and a crash

I could turn you to ash.

You could also ask them to imagine a different place of origin from that of further off from Mars and explain why they chose it.

Another idea is to use an extract about Harry Potter’s detention at Hogwarts and ask students to compare reactions to detention.

If your students are old enough, they could be asked to write a letter to the press asking for the abolition of such a harsh and pointless form of punishment.