marichiko

Ideally, you should teach kids by example, and this goes back on the parents. If the kids haven't been taught to be civilized by time they reach Jr. High, really about all you can do is call rank on them to preserve order in the classroom. When I was a librarian at Fort Lewis College, the football coach got the bright idea that the guys on the football team be required to spend one night a week at the library studying to keep their grades up. I guess brilliant thinking like that was what prevented him from ever becoming a regular faculty member. The football team would come in together as a group, pass around a bottle of Jim Beam among themselves and generally be as disruptive as possible, distracting the other kids who really were there to get some studying done. It was my ill luck to be librarian in charge on Thursday nights - the nights the team came in to "study." I gave them two warnings and then I called up the coach and let him have it. He came over to the library, pulled the team members aside in a seperate room and let THEM have it, up one side and down the other; telling them he didn't care if he had to scrub every single one of them from the team and play third string for the rest of the year. After that, all I had to do was say the magic word "coach," and butter wouldn't melt in those boys' mouths for the rest of the night.