Yesterday was the worst day, yet, for me.

I won’t get into it, other than to say there was a whole new level of disrespect from a certain gender, and I did not handle it well. I was angry, and shrill, and found myself in I-can’t -even-count-how-many power struggles.

The disrespect is very hard not to take personally. I have tried really diligently to connect with every single kid in my classes, and most of them have completely taken advantage of me.

So I’m going in today with a plan. I just have to formulate it.

I’m going to try to keep it simple and limit my speech, because it’s only so long before they tune me out, anyway.

They disrespect or disrupt, they get lunch detention. Simple, right? They try to blow off the detention, and I call the office to have them sent down to me. They write themes on the importance of respect. Or how they plan to show more of it in the immediate future. Or which behaviors they think keep landing them in lunch detention, and how they intend to correct them. Oh, I’ll get them writing, alright. It will be their ticket to leave.

I’ll probably have a lot of them for a while. When you’re working on extinguishing a behavior, it gets worse before it gets better.

Should I give one verbal warning before sanctioning detention? Maybe. But it’s a slippery slope. It’s easy to say just one warning, but then have “just one” become two, three, etc.

I don’t think I need to give a verbal warning for disrespect. Maybe disruption.

I should write up a plan and post it in the classroom. Yes, that’s what I’ll do.

There, I did it. I wrote two whole policies: one for behavior and one for detention. Now I’m exhausted and I want to go back to bed.

In fairness, Shane woke me up at 1 AM.