Volume Level 1: Scream!

Generally, yelling and screaming only works to grab students’ attention briefly and immediately, it works to stop a fight between boys (girls continue fighting through even the loudest screaming, don’t bother), and screaming seems to work if you’re trying to communicate with students who are very far away from you.

Any other application of screaming is silly.  Students, when they identify a screamer, will go out of their way to make the screamer scream. They learn new and creative ways to prompt the screamer into screaming all year.  Screaming becomes as much of a reward as candy or a pizza party to students working diligently at making a screamer scream
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Personally, I’d rather my students engage in the content and skills that I’m trying to teach them than have them engage in behaviors that are purposely designed to make me scream at them. As an English teacher, I try  my best to convince students that logic, organization, and a well-formed and well-supported argument is the most powerful language tool in the world. Let’s take a look at the message that screaming at students sends.

When a teacher screams, it says “I can’t explain this to you in any authentic way, so I’ll try to cover my inabilities with volume.”  Screaming is not an explanation. Screaming doesn’t leave kids with any lasting knowledge or skills. If a teacher’s job is to inform their students, screaming at them doesn’t seem like a very effective way to inform. Just like the fire alarm or siren, screaming will make kids close their eyes and cover their ears, and that’s really the opposite of the posture we want students to adopt in our classroom.
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When a teacher screams, it says “I am trying to overpower you.” A screaming match is not the basis for a good lesson. No teacher ever went home and said to her loving husband, “Babe, I had the best screaming match today, I hit 56 decibels and my student could only get 48. Thank goodness he had asthma!” As a matter of fact, “overpowering” is not a great strategy with students in general. In my experience, out-thinking unruly students works pretty well. Out-classing unruly students works well. Out-focusing, out-polititicing, waiting-out, hearing-out, and talking-it-out all work. Out-shouting does not work.

There are other problems to being a screamer. The first time you scream, kids react. The second time you scream, kids notice. The third time you scream, kids are used to it. The fourth time you scream, kids ignore it.
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That’s not a long, fakely hyperbolic life expectancy for the effectiveness of screaming. “React” is the only goal you should ever have when managing student’s behavior. Screaming only makes students react if you VERY rarely scream. Naturally, to elaborate, I’ve written a true-ish story sharing an anecdote about one of the very few circumstances when screaming was necessary because of:

1. the potential consequences of NOT screaming.
2. the distance between the teacher and the students.
3. the relatively loud ambient sound generated by a crowd of dismissed students.
4. the amount of fun that comes from trying to create a folk legend in the school in which you work. Not enough people have fun at work. Why isn’t work more fun for people?