The events in this article are based on actual occurrences. The names and, in some
instances, the genders of individuals have been changed to protect the individuals’
privacy.
He opened his laptop and started playing around, again. I hadn’t quite noticed until I’d gotten the rest of this Year 7 class to get their books open and start completing the questions that were on the whiteboard.
It took a good five minutes for them all to settle down.
They’d just been learning about the human body in the best way I could think of: They took apart a life-sized model of a human female (filled with plastic, life-sized organs) and completely rebuilt it.
It had gotten them quite excited; especially the boys, who thought that the mammary glands inside a female breast were completely hilarious!
The class then had to cut and stick a paper human body together – organs included. But he was taking too long.
Christopher was a happy and talkative kid, but his work-rate was slow. On two occasions that lesson I walked over to his desk to help out and remind him to speed up, as everyone else was ahead of where he was. He should have been able to get that work done quickly. He had no Special Educational Needs and his English proficiency had increased so much in three months that he had graduated from the E.L.D. programme.
The only thing slowing him down was his chattiness.
I should have moved him sooner in the lesson – my mistake. 15 minutes before the end of the class I moved him to the front to sit next to me, where he couldn’t chat with friends and be distracted.
It wasn’t enough time.
I pondered the idea of giving him a detention. Break-time was straight after this lesson so it would be easy for me to keep him behind for ten minutes to get that work done.
The concept and purpose of detentions
Before we can fully understand how to use detentions effectively, we must first remind ourselves of what detentions are and, therefore, what their purpose should be.
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