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Alright Staylds family, I need your best ideas for working with kids – specifically 9 year old boys. My youngest son is 9 and his primary teacher asked me to sub for her class. I’m very familiar with these kids having taught them before on several occasions and helped out with my son’s cub scout activities, etc. This is a hard group for a few reasons. It’s a large, predominantly male class and about three of the boys in the class are extremely jaded. They already roll their eyes at everything you say, they make sarcastic comments, they refuse to participate, and they are disruptive and disrespectful. The kicker is that two of these boys have moms in the Primary presidency.
Now, I’ve taught early morning seminary to a rough crowd and I’ve had some tough experiences working with teenagers over the years but I have never seen this kind of attitude in kids so young. My own son and the other kids in the class still get excited to play games, volunteer to read, find silly jokes hysterically funny and basically act their age. These troublesome trio will sit, arms crossed, legs outstretched in defiant refusal to participate like angry 16 year olds.
So…. I need suggestions! I need your best ideas for engaging these boys. I’ll be subbing for 3, count ’em, 3 weeks in a row and I’d like us all to get through it alive.
If possible don’t let them sit together. If they don’t volunteer to participate then call on them.
Take away their agency
If they get too bad take them to their parents.
Talk to them separately before class and get them to paricipate in one way or another like taking the roll, passing out something, etc. Make them feel important or part of something bigger.
Mng, I taught a 10 yr old class for a while and had a group like that, and I worked with kids and youth long enough that I thought I could handle it … And honestly, nothing I did seemed to matter… The 3 boys in my class did their thing no matter what I tried. However, I teach the 13 yr old Sunday school class, and lo and behold, the same boys are there in my class again, except they grew out of their behavior a bit. I think they go through phases. But that doesn’t help you for the next 3 weeks. Some things that might help that I tried:
– snacks for participation (I don’t like the idea so much on principle, but it gets results)
– treat them with respect, if they are bored…challenge them with some interesting doctrine. My group had heard all the primary stories. But when I asked them what they thought about Heavenly Mother, they perked up with some interesting thoughts. The caution obviously, is keeping it in bounds, where the other kids in the class don’t leave shell shocked. I never taught anything I wouldn’t feel comfortable teaching with the bishop sitting in my class, but I did push them a little, and they sometimes responded to my amazement and I think I saw a little why they were acting out, they were bored.
– make it apply to their lives somehow
– sometimes I ignored their behavior and if they were trying to get attention by being the tough guys, I let them be and focused on the other kids who were interested in learning, so the others didn’t deprived of their opportunity to learn.
– finally, I tried to engage the kids outside of class and joke with them. It seemed to help when we got in class. You will bein there for 3 weeks, so developing relationships outside class won’t really happen, but it may help break the ice.
Good luck. It’s not easy. I don’t envy you…but you seem like a pretty patient and loving person, so I’m sure you’ll do well. You’ll probably be called to teach that class permenantly
Heber13 may be on to something. These boys likely have lived with adult hypocrisy, dishonesty, inconsistency, manipulation, and selfishness. A bit of honesty (vulnerability) and open questions might go a long way. “No way! An honest adult!” Part of the power of the Heavenly Mother question may have been that you honestly weren’t trying to manipulate them with the question. You were willing to hear whatever they thought. If I asked them, “What do you think of church?” it could be equally as stimulating as long as my listening was open.
In general, I really like Heber13’s suggestions (and his prediction).
I’m a teacher for a living, and did the YM Presidency thing three times, and have a son that age. I have a few suggestions. 1. If your time allows, spend some time one on one with the ringleader of the reluctant boys. Win him over somehow in a non-Church context. Invite him over, or even the whole reluctant group for something fun at your house, or SOME activity they think is fun. You could also invite him to bring a friend, but do something that builds a relationship with him or them outside of class — you would know best what that is.
If it was my son, I’d let him bring a friend over and it would be a lego-tower building activity where we build a tower as high as possible and make it withstand a wind test (and hopefully it will crash over) — each kid will have their own interests like that that you could find out and speak to so they want to spend time with you. With one group, I took them on a bike hike and then we roasted hot dogs together. With another kid, we made a water-balloon launcher.
When you get to Church, the relationship will probably be different after this investment in time with them, and the class will probably go better.
2. Keep the lesson an activity period as much as possible. I used to have a slingshot that could shoot nerf balls and I had a brief lesson and then everyone took target practice at a waste-paper basket — but they had to answer a question about the facts of the lesson before they could shoot the nerf ball. I couple parents raised eyebrows but I kept doing fun activities like that and they started bringing all their friends to Church!!!
3. Try to teach without teaching. Sounds strange, but I do it all the time. You design an activity and the activity does the teaching. For example, you have cards. One card has a question on it, and the other has an answer, and you place all the cards face down. They take turns turning over cards to match the question with the answer. Because they don’t know what the matches are because you haven’t taught anything yet, you tell them what the match is they are looking for, and in the process are teaching your lesson. As other kids turn over a previously turned-over question or answer, you ask the class to tell you what the matching answer or question, remembering what you said earlier.
Also, I had a multiple choice “quiz” that I handed out and I would ask the question, and everyone would guess at what the answer was. People who guessed right got a candy. So, the information is wrapped in an activity, is my point.
Good Luck. It’s a bit of an art — a combination of the teacher’s personality and the interests of the boys.
When I taught that age, I told them upfront that I would try to teach them something each week that most adults in the ward didn’t know – in the last 10 minutes of each class. Then I looked for the most interesting, gross, violent, weird, “deep”, etc. thing I could find that was relevant to the lesson and taught them about it at the end of the class. Of course, we were studying the Old Testament that year, so it wasn’t much of a challenge.
😈 I agree with Ray, learning to combine the spiritual with the sensational is a strategy I used constantly. Thank for all the great advice and encouragement. I taught public school, I home school, and I’ve been a teacher in the church almost steady for 2 decades but for some reason this crew has been harder than any I’ve had before. I think part of it is just that they are so young to have lost their innocence. Even when I taught underprivileged kids, my 3rd an 4th graders were still fairly easy to engage.
PS Heber – I don’t think I’ll be back in Primary any time soon
Well, with some kids, I’ve found it’s just hard, particularly if nothing works in spite of all that experience, compassion and trying. If it gets really bad, I’ve ejected kids from classes to sit with their parents. But it’s only after a warning and such. SilentDawning wrote:Well, with some kids, I’ve found it’s just hard, particularly if nothing works in spite of all that experience, compassion and trying. If it gets really bad, I’ve ejected kids from classes to sit with their parents. But it’s only after a warning and such.
I hope it doesn’t come to that. I’m going to employ a lot of the techniques (maybe all of them) you’ve all described and pray for the best. I’m going to see how I can revamp the lesson so that it gets reasonably well covered from an interesting and honest perspective through some sort of activity with an accompanying reward. Sound about right?
I may have some group activities and group presentations so that I can sit with the troublemakers and put my arm around them part of the time. It always does wonders when a kid feels loved.
Sounds like they are lucky to have you as a teacher…wish I could see it in action!! I would probably learn something 
Various possibilities: 1) These just might be naturally rebellious kids.
2) These might be intelligent kids who have been bored stiff in church for years.
3) These might be kids with very strict parents who use church as a place to rebel.
4) etc.
I know you know all of that, but it’s worth putting out there sometimes.
Much better suggestions than my few bullet comments. You folks are great. Old-Timer wrote:Various possibilities:
1) These just might be naturally rebellious kids.
2) These might be intelligent kids who have been bored stiff in church for years.
3) These might be kids with very strict parents who use church as a place to rebel.
4) etc.
I know you know all of that, but it’s worth putting out there sometimes.
I was thinking about these things – it’s just hard to know. I wonder if they have touch of affluenza. We live in such a privileged and indulgent society that there’s not a lot we haven’t seen or experienced, at least vicariously. The visual aids and objects lessons of yesteryear that grabbed my attention are yawn-worthy to the I-pod generation.
I’m going to have to put some serious time into this
Thanks again for all the insights everyone! I don’t have to teach until the end of June, beginning of July so I have some time to prepare.
I agree with the fact that visual aids and even watching a movie can be yawns-ville at Church. I think it’s part of the reason my son is so disengaged. It’s hard to compete with it. Now that most of my courses are online, I find it really challenging to keep university students engaged during their onsite periods. I have to cut out anything that can be read easily, etcetera, and make sure the in-class time is full of interaction, activity, and discussion about hard concepts they can’t get easily on their own — and I have to insist they put their laptops down or turn the computer monitors to the front or they will be on facebook or surfing. It’s a challenge and its upped the ante for face-to-face experiences.
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