There's got to be a better way...

It was a rough week overall at work. First of all Cindy was having me do follow-up calls to all the people we invited to participate in or donate to the Fall Festival. Ick. And time was pressured Thursday and Friday to get the October calendar finished. And I had to stay late 3 days wrapping things up after working with kids until 6.

Tuesday was very frustrating. J was having issues following instructions and was being goofy. He ran into the back room and hid in the corner and wouldn’t talk to me or look at me. So I let him stay there while the others ate snack. Forcing him back to the room would have been met with more resistance on his part and goofing off and distracting the other kids from what they should be doing. My mistake, which led to the frustrating conversation with Cindy, was when I sent our volunteer back there to do his homework with him. I was thinking about so many other things that I didn’t think about the fact that a volunteer should not be alone in a room with a child. Big oops. So I asked them to move up to my office, no problem.

I felt pretty good about the way I had handled the whole situation. But when I relayed the whole story to Cindy, her response seemed to be that I should have been harder on him, should have given him an ultimatum and a punishment for not returning to the room. I was trying to be caring and maintain my sanity, and she wanted me to be strict and tough. Her advice for any subsequent situations that may arise was “You just have to be really firm sometimes and show them who’s boss, so that they know you’re serious. Sometimes I say things that make me cringe when I hear other people say them, but you’ve gotta do it, or they’ll never listen to you…” I know in my heart that that is not true. The problem, though, is that it’s so crazy and chaotic that we don’t have the time or staff to have the deeper one-on-one conversations with the kids about their feelings and needs and how they respond to each other. But I refuse to believe that it’s impossible to do any of that.

If they’d stop yelling at each other to stop yelling, we might actually be able to accomplish something. I have got to figure out how to talk to these kids in NVC, because I cannot do the yelling and threat thing. D ran away today after he was done reading. His brother chased him down, and one of the high schoolers carried him back. Sigh. At one point I had to take him into the hallway and make him get his body under control because he was just crazy and lashing out and jumping/kicking/punching like he does…then he was better for a while.

I think Cindy thinks I’m overwhelmed and don’t how to handle having 7 kids in my room. She keeps wanting to take some away and give me “easier” ones. We've already switched D and N out. Yesterday, she proposed taking J and E (two 1st-grade boys) out of my room in exchange for two older kids, but I managed to talk her out of it.

In terms of the kids in my room, I think I just got off to a bad start with them. I didn’t manage to establish rules/expectations right off the bat: the environment was not at all conducive to it, and it’s hard to talk to a group of kids who are bouncing off the walls… Most of my time is spent responding to things the kids are doing rather than preventing them from happening in the first place. The thing about J is that he reminds me of me when I was little – he’s very shy when people ask him to do things and doesn’t want to talk to adults or people who are trying to pry information from him. And then he just gets physical and goofy to avoid it.

P.S. his mother is from Honduras.