Discipline A Problem Teaching At Luton College

212 with double gates and half moon drive way. We owned this house apart from a £24,000 mortgage.

We were able to purchase a three bedroom detached bungalow in Snailbeach for £37,000, which we purchased out right with no mortgage.

When we came to sell it and move back to Luton in 1988 it was sold for £41,000. This value had risen by £4000. At that time we bought Graham Gardens for £78,000 and had to raise £42,000 by way of mortgage. This was only a small 3 bedroom detached house however the awful thing to us was our old house in Bierton was up for sale for £199,000. These house prices had risen so much due to inflation we had to buy a house way down on valuation the list. Had we stayed at Bierton we would have owned a house worth nearly £200,000 or alternatively moved from Bierton to Luton we could have owned the Luton house with no mortgage. Instead we were in an inferior house worth only £78,000 but with a mortgage of £42,000.

Both my wife and I found this difficult to swallow and I felt robbed. This was to be a hurt to me for many years.

Whilst at Luton I began to recover but was still unhappy about the church situation.

I did not fell ready to re enter the Gospel Standard cultural set up due to the awful problems I had encountered whilst at Bierton. At the same time I was not free to get involved in churches which where not Calvinistic due to my experience in the Pentecostal Holiness Church. So we found our selves un-churched again. However I began to feel a lot better coming out of sever depression and I began to enjoy the simple things in life again and I could smile once more.

Discipline A Problem Teaching At Luton College

During all this time I still held on to my job and taught at Luton College. Discipline however was not my strong point. How to keep control of a class of 24 teenage students from various ethnic backgrounds was not an easy task. I adopted my own methods, one might say a manic method.

When I was training to be a teacher at the Wolverhampton Polytechnic one teacher, taking the subject of discipline in the classroom told us only of one method. This was my course in classroom management.

This lecturer had to teach a class of craft students and wanted to assert his authority before they got out of hand. Craft students are noted generally to be awkward to manage. He decided this would make sure he would have no problems with them later on in the course.

During the class when he was teaching technical drawing, he asked one of the students to go out to the building sight and bring to him a large plank of wood. When the student returned with the wood the lecturer took it from

213 him and with one mighty karate chop, broke the wooden plank in two. He then proceeded to use the plank of wood as a ruler on the chalkboard just as though nothing had happened. He did not say a word to the students. The students stood back in amazement at this show of strength and took it as a warning. This was the lecturer method of saying to the class don’t mess with me or you will get what this plank of wood got.

I found this story amusing and from this I was supposed to learn all about class management. With this limited knowledge I took it that you had to find your own method of discipline in the classroom so decided to have some fun.

One of the problems I initially found was enforcing the college rules. One rule was no eating of drinking food in the classrooms. How do you stop it? Sweet papers were evident, empty drink cans evident, so it went on whether they were allowed to or not. Even when they were told they still broke the rules.

I decided I would sort this problem my way. I thought if you couldn’t beat them then join them. So I made it a rule that if I found them eating sweets or food in the class I would make them share them and help I would my self to their food. I proceeded to do so. It soon got around that I was taking their food. Whether this stopped the eating problem I do not know but on this one occasion the student got one over on me.

I saw at the back of the class two students messing about under the desk and their mouths were in operation. I stopped teaching and went to the back of the classroom and sure enough a lovely fat juicy Mars bar was in Chavda’s hand. I had caught them red handed. I said come on you know the rules give it to me. Not without their protest I took it from him and looked forward to a big bite. As I consumed this mouth of Mars bar the rest of the class burst in to laughter- they all knew- I didn’t. I discovered pieces of white tablets mixed in with the chocolate. They had laced the Mars bar with laxative tablets and got their own back one me.

They were totally amused and from that time I had no real trouble.

On another occasion I had some trouble with Chavda again and could not stop him from causing a disturbance in the class. I must have ruffled his feathers as on this occasion he threatened to sort me out. He was and Asian about 17 years old and I must have been about 30 years old with out much experience in dealing with this type of situation. In my determination to sort this problem out I challenged him to do it in the boxing ring, thinking this would put as stop to it all. How ever the class took up this suggestion and he too went along with the idea- Yes- OK. How.

Oh dear I thought to my self-how am I going to get out of this one. I said