Coworkers

I have a coworker Gil who is pretty friendly with me. He's always trying to help me out and give me advice and I help him out with scanning scantrons and entering data sometimes too. I can tell he enjoys my company (or maybe just having someone to give advice to who is likely to agree with him), but I often find myself kind of unsettled after talking to him. His methods are pretty different than mine. It's pretty disheartening because he's so much more effective than me too. I walk into his classroom and it's dead silent and most of the students are working. The ones that aren't working are at least not bothering the other students. And we have several of the same kids as well. One of mine, Ahkaila, was sitting quietly in her seat the whole time, when in my class, the phone is always out and she wanders out of the classroom at will. During my class she frequently yells out, often at really inappropriate times saying really inappropriate things. Sitting quietly was not even enough for Gil- he told her to do some work and she said no and he immediately threw her out of the class. If I threw out everyone who wasn't doing work, I'd have about three people left. And when I give Ahkaila a referral, she just bolts out of the room, often with a parting profanity or two. When Gil gave her a referral, she just quietly sat there and left quietly when the campus supervisor came to pick her up. It wasn't until after Gil started to call security that I even realized that Ahkaila had done something worthy of a referral. Sigh. Talking to Gil about it afterwards, he was describing how he gets them all in line, and I don't know that it's something I could do. Every teacher has their own style, so advice only goes so far, but it's kind of disheartening to hear advice I really don't want to take having such good results. He more or less treats them like dirt. He said "You've got to tell them to sit the fuck down." I said you couldn't cuss out the students. He said you can't say those words, but you can do it in your tone. There's something pretty callous about Gil really. We had a test a few weeks ago that had a scantron portion and a written portion. Today I helped him input the scantron portion. He made a comment about how he didn't know what their grades were until he scanned it in and I said that he still had to grade the written portions. He just sort of laughed at me and said he wasn't going to and it's not like he was ever going to return them anyway. That's not the way it's supposed to be. It really shouldn't be. Sigh.

I don't think I'd be so upset about the way Gil teaches if I wasn't so dissatisfied with how my class is run. It's a bit of a zoo. I mean, it's not like he's perfect. Far from it. Many of his students fail. But then again, so do many of mine. And perhaps in a few years I'll have a better results, but every part of me says you shouldn't get results the way Gil teaches and he pretty much unequivocally does. I guess I'll get better at it eventually, but I don't really want to be better at it the way that he is. I don't know. I guess I'm just down because I want a classroom like that, but I also don't. I'm very conflicted.