Week 3

One more visible rule is that in the morning all the kids sit down for morning circle and they are allowed to pull up a chair if they can't sit on the rug. An invisible rule is that while some one is at the "take a break" table then no one is to talk to them so they must sit alone at the table. Another invisible rule is that even though this new teacher is a stranger to them, she is seen as an authority figure because she is the adult and they are the children. Another visible rule in the classroom is that if the take a break table doesn't work and the student is still misbehaving, they go to the buddy room until they are ready to rejoin the group. This rule is similar to how the classroom was when I was growing up. At first if a student was misbehaving, the teacher would separate their desk from everyone else whether it was moving them right in front of the chalkboard or having the student sit in the hallway for a few minutes. After that if they were still disrupting the class, they would go to the resource teacher's room until they were ready to return. The next step after that was going to the office. One of the invisible things in Marcus's classroom is that when he is just doing his own thing or disrupting other students the teacher just continues the lesson and catches him up afterward. I feel like this connects to Ferri's rules of a classroom because she talks about how school is designed to take what makes some one different away from them. By letting Marcus do his own thing, the teacher is letting him explore how he learns best but it's also still creating that wedge between what is considered a normal child and a special child because if any of the other students did what Marcus was doing, they would've been sent to the take a break table or redirected away from that behavior.