My students accomplished a good amount of work (despite the fact that I allowed them to work in groups, hey!) and I feel like my new system of encouraging rewards for good behavior and effort versus punishment for (low levels of) bad behavior and lack of effort is working.
And then there was a fight.
It wasn't in my classroom, but as soon as my students could hear what was going on, they rushed to the door, smiled, and began excitedly chattering as they mused who it was and what sparked the fight. It was like being in Ancient Rome during a gladiator battle.
I firmly told everyone to get back to their seats and they did, completing the rest of the current assignment. In the last ten or so minutes of class, the discussion circled back around to the fight as there were police officers in the hallway and we were given instructions to not let any students out into the halls.
Some of the students had a good idea who the victim of the fight was--someone who has a tendency to "run their mouth." They blamed this person for "talking s*** to the wrong person."
In my head I thought, hold up. I told my students that yes, this person may have been disrespectful to someone else. But that "someone else" had a choice in how to react, and they chose extremely poorly. A couple of students seemed to think about what I had said and seemed to be, if not in agreement, at least seeing the other side of things. But one asserted that there are just some people you can't cross--or else.
In my opinion, most everyone has a choice in how to act when presented with certain situations. In most cases, even if other problems do exist, most people have a functioning frontal lobe. But if they choose to make the same choices over and over and cling desperately to the same faulty thoughts, it becomes more difficult for them to change. This, however, does not make change impossible.
We humans have been gifted with a higher-order cognitive system, the cerebral cortex, which envelops the parts of the brain involved in lower-order cognitive processes (amygdala, thalamus, hippocampus, etc.) People have varying levels of this higher-order functioning, and within these varying levels exist various types and problems involving the process of this higher-order thinking. For some, the damage is too extensive for much to be done in the way of cognitive improvement. But I would argue that for many, faulty cognitive processes (like the tendency to automatically react with unwarranted violence towards another) are the result of, to put it bluntly, lack of adequate thought.
Thinking can help neurons branch out and form new connections, a process aided by neurotrophic growth factors (NGF). I believe that by pausing before acting and forcing oneself to think rationally about a situation, many can stop the initial reaction spurred by the lower-order parts of the brain. When one does this many times, stopping the initial reaction will become easier.
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