Dealing with Hot Tempers

This week I had to handle some conflict resolution with one of my ELL students in Ceramics. We are working on clay coil pots and she had spent a few days working hard on her piece. This particular day my teacher was out at meetings off campus and I was working with an art sub for the day. This student got her work out at the beginning of work time and found that her piece had collapsed and broke in several pieces. She was livid. She called me over, swearing up a storm, complaining about how she won’t start over because she worked so hard on that piece. I took a look at it and determined it couldn’t be mended, unfortunately, because it didn’t appear that she had scored her coils enough to make them strong enough to not fall apart. Her tablemates sat in silence as she and I worked out this dilemma. I told her that I understood why she was upset because she had worked really hard on it and that I knew she spent a lot of time on it. Since I couldn’t convince her to start over, even though there were three full class periods left to work on it, I realized that she was supposed to be in the advanced ceramics class, but needed to be switched into it by the guidance office because of an error. Advanced ceramics can do mostly wheel work if they choose. My thoughts were that she could get a piece tall enough for the objective requirements and embellish the piece with coils, which might be quicker for her to accomplish. She still didn’t want to hear it, continuing to swear and complain. I let her decide what she wanted to do and left her to figure things out on her own.

On this day, I did not have my CT to confer with over this situation right away. The sub tried to step in, agreeing with my suggestions for the student. The sub empathized with her as well which seemed to calm the student down. Soon, I noticed that the student started to roll out coils and start over. She seemed to have gotten her temper under control. I didn’t give her a writing assignment consequence for swearing in class because I felt that would have only escalated the problem instead of calming her down. This probably wasn’t proper protocol to not give her a consequence for swearing. I also feel that the students are finally beginning to test the waters to see what they can get away with when I’m their teacher. I addressed this in class Friday saying that this was their only warning and just because their normal teacher isn’t around to enforce rules, I will start to. I told them that I respect them by filtering my language and I expect that same respect from them.