The children are not the problem.

Parents, please. Before you send your child to my classroom, make sure you haven't allowed them to walk all over you the first five years of their lives. You may think you're taking the easy road by letting them get over here and there.

I've got news for you. Here and there becomes every single time a tear drips from their pretty little eyes, and before long you've created a monster. I have one such monster in my class. Unfortunately she entered school with only three weeks left in the year. That's not much time and I'm no miracle worker.

At the end of the week when she's become accustomed to rules and consequences she drifts by with relative ease. But the first two days of the week are horrendous, only because she gets away with murder all weekend.

I'm going to open a newspaper 10 years from now and see this kid's face staring back... and I'm going to say "I told you so."

The horrible fact is that the behavior is LEARNED. 99.9% of the time the child doesn't exit the womb in the form of a holy terror. They only know what we teach them. Not all lessons are verbal, either.

Telling a child to behave and teaching them to behave are two totally different tasks. One having positive results, the other negative. Figure it out.