Classroom Management as Spiritual Practice

Working with classes of middle schoolers is sometimes a joy, and sometimes a trial.  Facilitating short term programming with social and emotional learning goals gives countless opportunities to practice what I preach, blending my classroom management style with the content of my teaching points for the students.  Some days, due to a multitude of reasons, this proves to be extremely difficult.   Students are always deserving of grace, and usually their disrespectful behavior has very little to do with the instructor who is just caught in the crossfire of frustrated human need.  My own needs for perfection and for reliable feedback to know whether or not the students are understanding the material can block my own access to the "wisdom to know the difference" between realistic student need and my own projected needs. Loving difficult classes of students, comprised of difficult individual students, is easier to summon when you are no longer standing in front of the class.  In front of the class, I can only hope to draw from the strength of Niebuhr's serenity prayer, striving only to change the things that I can.  I can only hope to continue to become more attuned to what my behavior is actually in response to, what I should actually strive to impact, and what I need to accept as out of my control and let go.