I teach cooks and waiters, large classes of 30 students in one classrooms, mostly boys (age 15-20, since they flunk a lot, some don �t finish high school as planned...).

I also had problems with classroom behaviour, i.e. they talk a lot, they play with their cell phones, they interrupt me when I give lecture...anything you can imagine, some kids are really rude and obnoxious.

My magic formula was to keep them as busy as possible. First of all, I explain my classroom rules on my first day with them, so they know what to expect from me and what I don �t tolerate. Then, I try to organise my classes in a way that I don �t do anything, and they do everything. For example, I ask them to come up with a dialogue in a restaurant with a specific purpose (order fish dishes, complain a lot as a guest, deal with a difficult customer as a waiter...I create a lot of prompts and conversation cards for that). Then they have to memorise that dialogue in a par, one student is a waiter and the other is a guest, and they act it as a role-play. Believe it or not, they all work on it for 2 sessions of 45 minutes, and they don �t complain. I �m there to help them, and overlook them, but usually they do all the work with a little help of their books. They like to improvise, and I encourage them and sometimes it is even funny what they come up with when given a bit freedom. Grammar is a bit problematic, but games and competitions help a lot. My grammar exercises are also adapted to their work as cooks and waiters, so sometimes they don �t even realize they �re doing grammar, they think they �re exercising restaurant phrases. Transparency is wonderful here, because when they copy from the transparency, they don �t have mush time to be nasty, because I limit the time for writing, so they hurry to write everything down and that keeps them busy and concentrated for 30 minutes, and the next 15 minutes they do exercises out loud, when they are attentive because they want to hear the right answers, because I trick them by tellling them that these exact sentences will be on the test next week. But usually, I have to switch activities every 10 minutes as well. Also for me, punishment never worked, but giving them praise for every little tast they acompliched, or overpraising their effort to try to solve some exercises gave resulted in them competing to please me!

When none of this works, I talk to the one or two worst boys alone, and tell them that they are smart and that I �m dissapointed to see that they behave so bad, when I know that they are the smartest in the class. I make them sit in front of me and pretend they are my favourite students and they get so proud that they change completely.

 

Try it out and good luck!

 

Sasa

 

But As Tere says, here in argentina it s a bit different because it is not that students are bored or get bored. They are just not interested at all... and it happens in every subject...

 

I try bringing a game every class to show them they can learn by playing , or preparing a song... but with games they just dont follow the rules, they start talking really loud, they dont listen to each other, and with songs they just want to listen to the song and do not want to work on it...

 

Authorities, well, you are right Tere, they do not help that much because if you send a kid to talk to them two things happen: kids are happy cause they miss 15 or 20 min of the class and the Principal cant do much. She can call the parents but you know what? it is alwasy the teacher �s fault... because we do not have resources, skills or we  do not know how to handle a group of adolescents.

 

So  thats why Im trying everything out before sending them to talk to the principal or talking seriously with them.  may be it  sounds weird to you who teach in another country  cause probably you do not have these kind of problems....

 

Thanks again for your answers!!!

 

It  is so nice to see that you care about others problems and answer so quickly...

 

I love this site! THANKS!