The joys of teaching

I am not very good at being authoritative. I am the youngest and never had the opportunity to boss around a younger sibling. I also hate confrontation and will do everything possible to avoid it. I do not like knowing I made someone feel bad. Well that personality does not always work when teaching. Sometimes you just have to put your fist down and scold the kids. Today was that type of day. My evening class, a class of 4 boys, was their usually rowdy obnoxious selves. I usually will play for the first bit of the class, but when I tell them to stop and it is time to be serious, I expect them to understand that. Today they did not want to listen. I told them to stand in line nicely and quietly. Did they do that? Of course not, they are boys! So what did I do? I took away gym for them. That is the ultimate punishment for these boys. They love gym! So when I take it away they know they did something bad. When we sat down in the classroom I just looked at each one of them and was silent. They didn't say anything or make a noise (which has never happened before). I asked them why they did not get to go to gym and no one would answer. It took a while before they would start to talk. I have never had to be so harsh, but they needed it. After our little talk we started to read a book. I turned to write something on the white board and got a huge grin on my face. I thought to myself, "That felt good." That might be a horrible thing to say, but after you tell them to do the same thing about 25 times each class for 2 months, you start to get sick of it! We will see how the kids are tomorrow. Hopefully they learned their lesson, but probably not!