I started off having problems with students and I had a novel approach to curing misbehavior. Whatever assignment I was given to teach the children, I would have each student read one paragraph aloud in class. If anyone started talking, I would stop the class and say, "When it is your turn, would you want someone talking while you are reading? Then, every time someone spoke again, I would stop the person speaking and ask the same question. If it happened from the same person, I would ask the student talking if they would like to read next? The students who have the most problems reading are generally the talkers. This helped control the class and plus, it helped get the students to read the information as they were terrified of fumbling when it came to be their turn. Give it a try and tell me what kind of reaction you get.

There is a huge problem of school not being relevant to students these days. Rote learning with the teacher talking and the students listening just doesn't work for kids beyond the fourth grade. It takes different strategies to keep kids interested in school. Hands-on activities are a great way to apply what the students are learning to their lives. Kids expect more than to be babysat. Teachers have no control of the class because they having nothing to bring to the table but rote questions and answers for a test. In real life there are few perfect answers.

In my years of reaching and teaching youth, giving kids real life hands on activities
was and is the best use of their time. If hands on learning could be a reward for getting the basics down, there would be much more learning going on. Public Schools after 5th grade are just a way to keep about half the the kids who stay in school from criminal activity. Once children reach 6th grade, they know they have been tricked. The ones that survive, are so brainwashed by the time they graduate and so full of useless information that they have almost no concept of what to do with their lives. It is to fill the nation with no useful information so that they will work at meaningless jobs for low wages.

Sorry for the rant. In Austin, Texas, 1 in 2 children will not graduate from high school. What is terribly wrong is not the kids but rather...the teachers, the administration, and the education system.