Classroom management is hard. One of the things that I'm least happy about in my life that Ukraine has done to me is that I've started to show more aggressive behavior... in a way. I have to be very stern and dramatic with the older generation about my independence. Otherwise, they mother me to the point of suffocation. In school, I have to give a lot of evil stares and "punish" unacceptable behavior. I put "punish" in quotes because that's another topic in itself because it's basically nonexistent in the school system.
One of the worst things is that I now raise my voice in the classroom. It's so not me. And, I realize that it does nothing to solve the problem. If anything, it just increases the din. I'm trying other techniques, and secretly laugh to myself about asking someone from home to send me a fog horn.
A few weeks ago I had a sore throat and since then my voice hasn't come back completely. I blame the classroom for this. When my voice was really bad, I channeled my grandfather, who always thinks of the worst possible scenario first. I thought about how in American Splendor Harvey loses his voice after stressing his vocal chords. I thought about Roger Ebert's cancer. I thought about Rosanne Cash and others who had to rest their voices by being silent for months at I time. I just looked at WikiAnswers, and yes, yelling can cause permanent damage.
I'm not going to do it anymore. I'm going to settle for the pounding on the desk method.
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