Be Helpful, and Let Students Help

The first rule you learn as a resident assistant in college or as a first aid responder is to give the people around you a job. When in a stressful situation (like a science classroom on an average Tuesday, let’s say) a teacher can easily be overwhelmed by the daunting number of tasks they need to achieve.
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At any given time, attendance needs to be taken, three children need to pee, another four children are lying about needing to pee because they want to use their cellular phones in the bathroom, five kids need your help with last night’s homework, your bulletin boards haven’t been updated since labor day 2006, you need to pass out today’s materials, you need to pass back yesterday’s graded papers (which you were awake until midnight grading), there are 75 unread emails in your inbox, the back of your shirt keeps getting untucked, you promised the student with the highest average his choice in comfy chairs, and he needs your help selecting the optimal chair, you suspect that bullying is happening in the back of your classroom, the sun is shining in one student’s eyes and the shades need to be adjusted, the projector must be off during attendance, but on for your PowerPoint, and the remote control has long since died, so you need to climb a chair to push the power button twice, and then the phone rings, and your principal shows up in the door to talk about a new club she wants you to advise -- run-on sentence intended.
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Two of my top students, modelling the "ugly crying" that most teachers feel most Tuesday's because of their workload.

As with first aid and resident assisting, the people around you need to be transformed from needy, attention-hogging stress manufacturers into useful workers that make your life easier. This only happens with clear expectations, concrete jobs, and a solid ‘you scratch my back I scratch yours’ classroom atmosphere.

I don’t do anything in my classroom. Shhh. Don’t tell the board of education. As the year progresses, I have distributors of today’s materials. I have distributors of yesterday’s grades -- only the most responsible and respectful students make the cut of grade distributor, because of FERPA regulations and general discretion. I have projector turner-on-ers and projector turner-off-ers. I have window shade management people. I have people who remind everyone else to do their jobs correctly. 
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"Sir Reginald" (we knighted him in class) demonstrating what is, and is not a garbage can.

I have the loudest, most obnoxious students who are most likely to throw objects onto my floor in charge of quality control, so no matter who throws objects onto my floor, the object throwers are in charge of either cleaning it, or making sure that the thrower cleans it. Ironically, by looking for other object throwers, the object throwers never realize that they’re not throwing objects, and object throwing ceases. Those same obnoxious students who have never picked up a pencil since second grade are the bane of other teacher’s existence. In my classroom they’re modellers, who show other students that during work time, eyes are on papers, pencils are in hand, and even when they never write anything down, at least they have a pencil. Sometimes you need to celebrate small victories. 
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I have bulletin board managers -- usually the highest level students who finish in three minutes. Instead of being bored and distracting other students, they group other students’ bulletin board responses, paraphrase, find, and alert me to common mistakes their classmates make. They pick out particularly fantastic answers and quantify what is fantastic about the answers -- it never ceases to amaze me that the fantastic answers always come from either themselves, their friends, or the prettiest girls in class.
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You get the point. A classroom is largely impossible for a single teacher to manage. It is imperative that eventually, the students be responsible for managing the mundane tasks required to create a successful classroom. Stop being frazzled and overwhelmed. You have at your disposal a workforce that behaves better when loaded with tasks than when given free time. You have at your fingertips a twenty-person-strong workforce who will gladly spend an hour pulling staples out of a bulletin board for the privilege of sitting in your stock-car-racing desk chair on Monday. 

Yes, I made a desk chair out of a racecar seat because I’m an uberdork and because I teach in a middle school and every boy in the eighth grade immediately knows I’m the coolest human they’ve ever met  just by looking at my desk chair. 

My classroom jobs are most emphatically not research based. Use classroom jobs that work for your classroom and teaching style. I generally classify the difficult children who refuse the jobs I give them as ‘Bored-y McBored-ersons.’ I’m so cute I get away with it. Ironically, when compared to walking around the classroom and passing out papers, being allowed to sit quietly and not disturb other students seems like a reward instead of a requirement. Bad kids are no longer bad. Win.

"Student A" asks for help on his math homework before school starts. "Student B" is amazing at math. Do I spend time teaching math, or do I enlist "Student B" to teach "Student A" math? Hmm...

I call errands ‘quests’ because it makes more students volunteer for them. Sometimes, I send the loudest students on the longest quests so that my study hall is smooth and quiet. (This is a great way to conduct a survey and generate authentic data.) (This is a great way to make sure that Friday is calm and nice instead of another battle with Evette the Study Hall Screamer.) My personal favorite quest was to send a very loud student, who frequently distracted all his classmates, around to every ELA classroom to see if anyone had a copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It was the best ninth period Friday ever. No one had the copy of the book, but that was ok because I keep a copy in my basement.