Choosing One’s Battles

One of my favorites left me a note about a comment I made about "choosing your battles. "

I am of a temperament that I can be in a constant state of frustration and anger if I don’t choose my battles. When I was teaching, I sat down and thought carefully about what bothered me and what didn’t. For example. I can take a low level of noise in my classroom. In fact, I encouraged my students to work together and talk about what they were doing, but there is a noise level beyond which I could not not let them go because it really bothered me.  We discovered this level in each class by trial and error. When the students got too noisy in their groups, I flipped the light switch off and back on again. If this was ignored, I calmly and not punitively broke up the group with a brief  comment about why this was happening, "…the noise level got too high and it was bothering me." and each student worked by himself or herself. Seventh graders are not stupid. They liked working together and talking, and after a few times when the groups were broken up, they pretty well policed the noise level themselves and reminded those with loud voices what would happen.

For a while, our school had no rules about gum. But I did. I cannot stand gum smacking or chewing gum with the mouth open. So, my rule was that if I could hear a student chewing gum or could see what color it was, they had to put it in the wastepaper basket. They were perfectly free to put another piece in their mouth after this as long as I didn’t hear the gum or see its color! Once we were in our new school, however, the principal banned gum completely. I generally ignored the chewing unless they made it so obvious that I had to deal with it…choosing my battles again. Another example of this was bad language in the classroom or out at recess. First, *I* had to hear it–no tales from others. If I did hear it, my comment was always, "What you have just said is not appropriate language for school. If I hear it again, I will have to do something about it. Is that what you want?" And of course, since most of them were people of good sense they chose to never say those words in my hearing again.  Seventh graders, especially boys, tend to have difficulty with the narrow line between being funny and being disrespectful and impertinent. So, when this happened, I would say, "I don’t think that came out quite the way you meant it to. Would you like to rephase it?" I was highly amused one day to hear one of my boys say something to another teacher and then say quickly, "That didn’t come out the way I meant it! Can I rephrase it?"

These days it takes quite a while before I get angry and/or frustrated in my daily life. Mind you, I get upset in situations like when I left my purse at Staples or when the Medicare bureauocrats write me a letter which makes me think I have no drug coverage! But Fred and I get on pretty well together. I really have no problem in seeing the little disagreements we have as just that–little enough that I can let them go.  However, having said that, there IS one thing that I can forsee a battle over. There are times when Fred won’t let me finish a sentence. He begins his sentence and talks over me — getting louder and louder. I have asked him not to do this but this request seems to have slipped out of his mind lately. This may well become a battle I feel I have to choose to do something about!

Until later….