Notice Me
I have to hide my dry erase markers. This is a new thing for me this school year. Usually, in my classroom, my high school students don’t pay attention to my markers. However, this year, I have a student who has found my dry erase markers and is attracted to the board in the front of my classroom. He enjoys drawing three-foot high pictures of Spongebob at the beginning of class when I am distracted. At the beginning of the year, when I first met this student, I was perturbed by his artistic expression. Usually this classroom graffiti happened just when I had cleaned my board and I was ready to start my lesson. “Oh great,” I would think in exasperation, “now I have to clean my board for the 100th time!”
After about the 3rd or 4th time these drawings appeared, I decided to hide my markers. Problem solved...or so I thought. Instead of my board, my student would now go after other students, misbehaving and annoying them disrupting class and interfering with my lesson.
It wasn’t until the end of a frustrating day that I started to think and reflect about why my student was doing this. Because, until that point, I had not thought there was a reason why he wanted to do this besides to drive me crazy. But then I remembered the literature and workshops I had attended about negative attention-seeking behavior and realized my student was trying to get attention - not just from me but also from his peers - to make up for his lack of feeling important and to avoid the one thing he dreaded about school: to engage in any type of academic work where, he was sure, his ego would take a beating.
As Alfi Kohn states:
Every day, and with every child, we need to keep in mind that behaviors are just the protruding tip of the proverbial iceberg. What matters more than “What?” or “How much?” is “How come”?
I need to remember that behaviors - positive and negative - in my classroom have a function for the student. Unless I realize that function and address the underlying need, that negative behavior will be a barrier to the learning goals I have in the class for all the students. Not only do students need attention from the adults in the room, but with teenagers especially, they are looking for attention from their peers.
Realizing that this behavior was the tip of an iceberg, I was able to provide my student the positive attention he needed using the techniques of random positive teacher attention. Like all things in teaching, this is a work in progress and I would be lying to say he never searches for my markers. But, I have gone beyond feeling frustrated and at a loss for understanding this annoying behavior. Not to mention, I I don’t have to clean my board so often!