My Prison . . . I Mean Classroom

Based on my understandings of "Discipline and Punishment" by Foucault, I think my own 8th grade classroom discipline style accurately reflects his theories.

In the beginning, the natural reaction to students that are getting out of hand, is to yell, or torture. Nearly all the student teachers I've had in my classroom, and even thinking back on my first year teaching, reflected this technique, which as Foucault points out, does not work. While it feels good for the teacher, or government body, and instills a message in the classroom, among the general population, in the end, you just find yourself yelling, or torturing, over and over again.

The key to running an effective classroom, or prison, is discipline. And that discipline must following Foucault's 4 characteristics: cellular, organic, genetic, and combinatory. To begin with, the discipline plan in the classroom must be cellular, in other words, I have to set-up the classroom in a way that allows the teacher to spatial separate the students into manageable groups. Then, it must be organic, or natural. I teach 8th grade, therefore I can't expect my students to naturally be able to analyze Foucault, but i can expect them to be able to analyze a character from a novel read in class. Third, the discipline in my classroom must genetic, I must be able to ensure the students' activities grow and change over time, to match their abilities. And finally, the classroom must be combinatory. I must be able to allow the students to join together into a single force to achieve a goal.

Once I unknowingly took these 4 characteristics into account in my prison/classroom, maintaining that never-ending gaze over my students/inmates became easy. Maybe the key to classroom management for new teachers isn't in reading educational theory texts, but rather, prison theory.