Post No. 026 : I will never... : 5775.04.25

Some teachers mete out punishments. Like having the student write the same sentence over and over.

For example, the sentence: "I will not pass notes in class."

The teacher catches a student passing notes. The teacher wants the student to feel discomfort for his action. Writing the same thing over and over is boring. Being coerced is ditasteful. Missing recess or staying after school is no fun. Writing something the student disagrees with is downright unjust. Writing sentences is thus uncomfortable in many ways.

The teacher may hope the student will internalize the message. The whole time the student is writing, which could be, say, 30 minutes to write the sentence one hundred times, the student may be thinking: "Why am I doing this? I hate it!" And the answer he may give himself: "Because I broke a classroom rule."

Does writing sentences deter future behavior? I don't think it would work for me. I think I'd be more likely to exhibit the behavior. That's because I like to think that when I misbehaved in school it was a calculated crime designed to send the message that I thought the teacher, school, and/or curriculum was out of order. Having found an activity that annoyed the system was more likely to lead me to repeat that activity than to become averse to doing it because I suffered some punishment for doing it in the past. The discomfort of being in the school to begin with overshadowed any punishment the administration could send my way.

For a student that misbehaves because he doesn't think before he acts, the punishment of writing over and over wouldn't seem to work, either. For students like that, nothing works.

For a student that misbehaves because it feels good, sentence writing won't deter, either. Even if he realizes he will have to write sentences, he will still misbehave. Because he likes misbehaving.

So what possible value can writing sentences have?! Is it just to make the teacher feel good that he or she managed to prove that he or she is boss in the classroom?

I think that writing sentences can have value. But the value is not from negative reinforcement. The value is not because the student is aware he will experience the pain of writing sentences if he misbehaves. That he's risking being bored, coerced, missing recess, and being subjected to injustice if he doesn't shape up.

The value is a positive impact on the student. The reason writing sentences can work has to do with the power of expressed language, the resistance to command, and the momentum of habits. In Post No. 028 we will explore these three concepts in more detail and draw a lesson that will apply to Journaling in America.