"STOP YELLING AT THE KIDS ALL THE TIME," he screamed at me.
Based on the results of this week's Twitter poll, we're talking today about yelling. Specifically: when is it okay for a teacher to yell at a student?
I'm sure many of you (especially you starry-eyed first-year teachers) immediately thought: "Never! There is never an appropriate time for a teacher to raise their voice at a student!"
The people who think that are absolutely wrong. I should explain.
Certainly, volume is a much-overused tool in both classroom and parental discipline. But the fact that some people yell incorrectly doesn't mean there's never a reason to yell, any more than the fact that some people are bad cooks mean we should all close our kitchens.
Your volume should never be connected to your emotion. Being a professional means you should be proactive, not reactive.
There are three situations--and only three situations--in which it's appropriate to yell at a student or a classroom:
Someone is in danger. In my chemistry lab, if a student is about to put something flammable near the burner, I bark "Stop moving!" at them. It works every time, and once I explain why I yelled, no one's feelings are hurt. In fact, they're usually grateful I didn't let them accidentally melt their face off.
You need immediate control of a situation. I once entered the room to find two young men in pre-fight mode: circling, mumbling threats to one another, oblivious to the rest of the world. A loud "Don't you two doofuses dare treat my locker room like it's Wrestlemania!" broke the moment and snapped them to reality. It also had the immediate effect of making them both mad at me, instead of each other. You may take issue with me calling them names. They certainly did. However, once I prevented the fight, I was able to talk to them and explain that God granted human beings reason, and solving small, manageable problems with fists instead of words is, in fact, the behavior of a doofus.
Reason isn't working. This one is going to be the most controversial, I'd imagine. If reason isn't working with a student, I have no problem raising my voice to see if that will work. That's because if words and reason aren't working, we're headed for a brute-force approach. In some schools, that may mean suspension or expulsion. In some, that may mean paddling. Either way, it's in the student's best interest that we not get to that point, so if I can insert one more last-ditch effort to keep away from brute force by yelling a bit, I absolutely will.
Not all teachers or parents will agree. I've arrived at my criteria over 17 years in the classroom, and I explain it to my students on the first day of school each year. Typically, I say something like "If I yell, one of these three things must be happening. You guys should know: if I yell, and it's not one of these three things, you have every right to call me on it. That's the contract we have with each other."
And it works for me. Here's when yelling doesn't work:
When you yell too often, it becomes meaningless.
Every school has the teacher that yells constantly, to the point that it's become a game to the students. I vividly remember the joy we felt in my high school whenever we got Mr. [Name Redacted] to blow his top. It was like an emotional lottery we played every day for valuable "bad kid" credibility points.
So how much yelling is too much? I just wrapped up a school year; I raised my voice twice in 180 days. My rule of thumb is this: if you're having to yell more than twice per semester per class, you need a serious re-evaluation of your classroom management plan.
When you yell about tiny things, you have no room left when it actually matters.
It's human nature. We notice novelty, and we become inured to routine experiences. I once managed a teacher who screamed at least once a day. If something seriously bad was going on, I never sent him to deal with it. Because I knew: he could have sprinted into the parking lot screaming "COME INSIDE QUICK! CARNIVOROUS BIRDS ARE COMING TO TEAR THE FLESH FROM YOUR BONES!" and the students would have thought "Yeah, but you screamed like a lunatic yesterday when I forgot my book, so how bad could this be?"
When a good teacher yells, students pay attention--because it's behavior they haven't seen before.
If you don't have their hearts, it does you no good to grab their ears.
Think for a moment about who you would permit to yell at you. I bet that list is short. In fact, I bet one of the things you most resent in life is feeling slighted or disrespected by someone who gets away with it simply because they have more power.
If my wife yelled at me, I'd pay attention. She has my heart. If my best friend yelled at me, I pay attention. He's eminently reasonable, and if he yells, something must be terribly wrong. If I ran into some of my old teachers and they yelled at me, I'd think "So you still don't understand how people work, huh?" and go on my merry way.
I can't stress this enough: your first job as a teacher is to build relationships with students. Human beings listen to people they trust. And human beings write off people that yell at them for no reason, or scream like lunatics all the time over nothing, or hide how bad they are at their job behind a curtain of volume.
And, of course, if you're the Scriptural sort, you could always default to the words of Jesus: "Love your neighbor as yourself." If you don't usually feel loved when you're being yelled at, they don't either.
(I've written some more about how I learned to manage my kids and students here, for ParentCo.)
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