Case Study for Chapter 6: Karen Lee
A first-year French teacher takes over a high school French Literature class in midyear and faces an unruly group of students. One student in particular seems determined to make her miserable.
“Three strikes, you’re out,” Karen thought as she walked briskly to Jeff’s desk in the back of the room. Standing beside him, she tore a piece of paper from his hand and ordered him out of the class. It was the third time in three weeks that she had found Jeff—an A student who was easily capable of doing the work—cheating on a test.
“I wasn’t cheating! Read what it says!” Jeff said as he willingly surrendered the paper. Karen felt the rest of the class looking on almost conspiratorially, gleeful that another confrontation was developing between the two.
“Out! Out! Now!” Karen shouted, incredulous that Jeff could plead his innocence even as she held prima facie evidence of his cheating in her hand. “Get down to the guidance office. I’ll see you there after class.”
“I wasn’t cheating! Read it!”
“Out!”
“I wasn’t cheating, you bitch!”
“What?”
“You want me to say it again? I wasn’t cheating, you bitch!” Shoving his books from his desk and flinging his test paper in Karen’s direction, Jeff stormed from the room, slamming the door behind him.
Karen, just four months into her first teaching job, fought to contain her rage and hold back her tears as she returned to her desk. As she gazed at her grinning students, she wondered who they thought had won this latest struggle for control of the class.
“Back to work,” she said. While the students spent the remaining twenty minutes finishing their tests, Karen sat at her desk wondering why this class had gone so wrong.
Although it was only December and the school year was just fourteen weeks old, Karen Lee was the fifth teacher for this tenth-grade, above-average-track French Literature class. Three substitutes had been hired after the regular teacher went on leave to receive treatment for cancer just before classes started in September. The teacher returned to school in mid-November, but she left again after only a few days when she found the treatments had left her too weak to resume her work.
The principal was reluctant to return French Literature, a language and culture class, to another string of substitutes. Karen had been teaching part-time and eagerly accepted the class when she was asked to take it, even though her entire schedule had to be shuffled to accommodate it. Nevertheless, the new assignment brought Karen up to a full class load at Victoriaville High School, and although it wasn’t a permanent appointment, Karen was pleased that she now would be working full-time as a teacher after being out of pre-service education only a few months. Both of her parents were teachers, and she had held the hope all through high school and university that she would also be a teacher. At just 24, Karen felt she had reached her career goal.
French was a passion for Karen. She began studying the language in grade nine at a public high school not far from Victoriaville. She spent her last year in high school as an exchange student at Holy Name of Mary, a private school for Catholic girls in Paris. After a year in Paris, Karen returned home and enrolled at a university near Victoriaville, where she received a bachelor’s degree with a major in French and a minor in education. After graduation, she rewarded herself with a summer of travelling in Switzerland. In the fall, she returned to Canada to accept the part-time position at Victoriaville High School.
Karen started with three classes in September and picked up a fourth when another teacher was named a vice principal and had to give up his classes. She added the French Literature class to her schedule the Monday after Thanksgiving.
There had been no warning that the new class might be a problem. The principal told her only that it was an above-average class of twenty university-bound students. Her other classes were going well, and Karen had no reason to suspect that this one would be any different. She expected that she would simply open the text to chapter 4, where the provincial curriculum indicated the class should be, and pick up where the other teachers had left off.
But Karen discovered on the first day that the substitutes had made little progress. The students were far behind the course outline and would have to do nine months’ work in six months’ time if they were to complete the French Literature curriculum and be ready for Grade 11 in the fall.
Karen’s second discovery was that the different-teacher-every-three-weeks syndrome had left the class in near anarchy, with little respect for the teachers and with no expectation that any real learning would take place.
The sense of lawlessness was heightened by the fact that there seemed to be no real cohesion among the twenty students. Although there were two distinct groups of students in the class—Karen had categorized them in her mind as “greasers” (those who wore leather motorcycle jackets and boots and seemed indifferent to school) and “jocks” (the clean-cut students dressed in the latest fashion)—there was little unity even within those groups. It was difficult to get any of the students to work together. The only thing that united them, Karen thought, was their ability to sabotage her lessons and frustrate her teaching efforts. They would rally around that and nothing else.
The class had only one leader: Jeff Cole, a 16-year-old fullback on Victoriaville’s football team, who was one of the brightest students in the class as well as the most disruptive. He seemed to have a constant need to retain his role as leader, or at least as chief instigator. Jeff never missed an opportunity to disrupt the class or to obstruct any momentum Karen tried to build. Most of the others would follow Jeff’s lead without much hesitation.
To try to contain their disruptiveness, Karen organized the students into five neat rows of four, with as much space between rows as possible. Her strategy was to divide and conquer and try to keep the students focused on her as she introduced new nouns, verbs, and sentence constructions from the front of the room. The students needed a great deal of drill work to bring them up to date, so Karen emphasized repetitive grammar exercises. Most days, she reviewed the material, had the students repeat it, and then assigned related written exercises in their books.
From the outset, however, Karen felt that they regarded her as only another substitute, and she constantly struggled for control. At first, the problems seemed relatively minor: side-bar conversations, off-task activities, minor disruptions. But gradually the students’ inattention increased, and whenever she demanded their focus, they would chatter about a football or basketball game or about the upcoming ski season or anything else that was unrelated to the material.
Gradually the problems escalated. During the first day of the second week, Karen was caught in a crossfire of coins being flung around the room behind her as she tried to conjugate a verb on the chalkboard.
“This is craziness, absolute craziness,” Karen thought as she listened to the ping of coins bouncing off the walls. She held the brief hope that the disruption would subside on its own if she ignored it. She continued writing on the board, reciting the verb as she conjugated it and pushing dutifully ahead with the lesson plan.
A sudden loud CRACK! shattered Karen’s concentration and her sense of safety. Instinctively, she jumped back from the board and swerved to face the class. A loonie coin, which had ricocheted off the chalkboard only a few millimetres from her ear, fell to the floor and rolled to the back of the room, accompanied by a chorus of chuckles from her students.
That was the last time Karen turned her back on the students. From then on, she used the overhead projector rather than the chalkboard whenever she needed to illustrate something to the whole class.
After the coin-tossing incident, Karen tried a variety of the assertive discipline techniques she had learned in her pre-service education courses, but few seemed to have any effect. For example, each time a student acted up, she placed a check next to his or her name on the chalkboard. If a student received five checks, he or she was assigned an hour of detention. But it became a game before long as students competed for the checks and ignored the detention assignments.
That illustrated another problem. The school’s policy concerning after-school detention undercut her efforts to run the class. At Victoriaville High School, only an administrator could authorize after-school detention, and school officials would not back up Karen’s detention assignments. They said that the district’s inflexible bus schedule make it awkward to detain students who lived far from the school.
Another school policy, one which allowed students to have class schedules without a lunch period, gave Jeff and six or seven others a daily opportunity to disrupt the class. According to the policy, students who did not have a regularly scheduled lunch period could take five minutes from their sixth-period class and ten minutes from their seventh-period class to eat. Jeff and several others had no scheduled lunch. Invariably, they would arrive fifteen minutes late for the forty-minute class and would require another five minutes to settle down. Once seated, with their notebooks open, they would complain that the lesson was difficult to follow, forcing Karen to start over again.
Karen worried that the abbreviated classes might be an insurmountable handicap to a class that already was several months behind. She offered the students a compromise: Come to class on time, and you may eat at your desks. Jeff and the others seemed to appreciate the compromise at first, and they regularly brought their lunches to class. But within a week, they slipped back to their routine of showing up ten to fifteen minutes late, and they brought their lunches to class as well.
For Jeff, the potential for disruption was doubled by his luncheon selections: carrots, potato chips, hot peppers, sardine and onion sandwiches, carbonated pop — anything that made a loud crunch or sprayed into the air or that was exotic enough to provoke some reaction from the others. After the first few days of Jeff’s in-class luncheons, the students would sit each day in breathless anticipation of what Jeff would have in his lunch bag. Almost always, it drew a reaction, which only encouraged Jeff to be even more outrageous the next day. Karen felt that the lunch fiasco was typical of the way Jeff turned her peace gestures against her.
The cheating incidents were also typical. Karen could tell from Jeff’s transcripts and test scores and from the brief moments when he did participate in her class that he didn’t need to cheat to get good grades. Instead, Karen believed, Jeff’s cheating was only an attempt to entertain himself and to prove to the other students that he could outwit her.
Jeff cheated on the first two tests, and both times she caught him. Because Jeff was a leader and an instigator for the rest of the class, Karen feared that his cheating would spread unless she made an example of him. She responded harshly; each time, she gave him a zero on the test, plus two days’ detention, and she sent notes to the guidance office and to his parents.
But now, sitting at her desk after ordering Jeff from the class for his third cheating episode, Karen thought that this incident was different from the earlier two. In the other two, Jeff clearly wanted to get away with it and was embarrassed at being discovered. This time, his cheating was blatant. He had nearly waved his crib sheet in the air. Karen felt sure that he wanted to get caught.
The period ended, and the other students turned in their tests and shuffled from the room. Karen’s mind turned back to the paper she had taken from Jeff before sending him to the guidance office. When the last student left the room, Karen took the paper from Jeff’s test, where she had stapled it. She unfolded it to see what he had written.
In bold red letters, it read: “Je ne triche pas, vous idiot!”
Karen mentally translated—“I’m not cheating, you idiot”—and sank into her chair, thinking that Jeff had won again.