The worst part about hitting classroom management rock bottom is that you don’t know you’ve hit rock bottom.

All you know is that when your alarm clock rings in the morning, it feels like your skin is getting ripped off. It’s like you’re mad that you didn’t just die in your sleep, and now you have to go into school and face these students.

I’m kind of exaggerating.

But if this is where you’re at right now, you know I’m not exaggerating by that much.

If you’re a teacher, you probably already know that being consistent is very important to classroom management.

And. . . you also probably struggle with being consistent.

In the 20 years that I’ve been working with teachers, I’ve found that the best way to make classroom management advice work is to break it down into three steps.

• First, why it actually is good advice in the first place.
• Second, why it’s sometimes easier said than done.
• And third, how to make it easier to do.

Some of your most regrettable moments as a teacher can come from earnestly applying what you learned in training.

Why?

Because it’s easy to over-apply good teaching principles to the point where they become bad teaching principles.

To illustrate, here’s a story I’m not particularly proud of.

Teachers actually don’t need to be great at everything.

Teachers need to be adequate at everything. Then they need to be good at the things that most affect their students.

And then they should strive to be great at a few little things that give them that extra spark as teachers.

When I was a fourth grade teacher, I remember sitting in the teacher’s lounge and hearing a teacher tell this story.

A kid was misbehaving in her class, and she called his grandmother. She called right from class, right in front of all of the other students, and told the grandmother what the kid was doing.

The grandmother said, let me talk to him.

The teacher put the kid on the phone, and in front of the whole class, the kid was just saying, yes, ma’am. Uh, yes. Yes, ma’am.

The whole class could hear the grandmother yelling at him through the phone.

The kid put down the phone and goes back to his seat, and whatever he was doing that day, he sure never did that again.