Hey, that's my corner!

Hey, I carried a sign on the street and look at me. I'm doin' grrreat.

Mother makes wayward daughter stand on street corner with sign

Seriously, I do have mixed emotions. How embarrassed that child must have been, so a bit of my heart goes out. I do have some other thoughts though. One "expert" said that we were to reinforce the positive things kids do rather than focus on the negatives.

Raise your hands if you've done that--you've told a class how you appreciated their hard work lately and the result was disastrous. Five seconds later, emboldened by their newfound "respect," they did the most jack-a-ninny thing ever, leaving you to wonder if they understood your sincerity in the first place.

Sincerity. Now there's a subject that some of these kids could get foreign language credit for. For example, I had this one student causing a disturbance in my class. I pulled her aside and before I could finish explaining why she couldn't interfere with the learning in the classroom by singing aloud while we were trying to read aloud, she said, "I'm sorry." Shocked I asked, "Do you mean that?" "No," was her empty response. "Then why did you say it?" I inquired. "Because," she said just as empty as before.

I wonder if that would change, if she spent an hour on the side of the road with a sign.