Caveat: Consistently Inconsistent

I had a rather bad day yesterday. 

I do fine when the kids are behaving well, but I have some issues with consistency when they behave badly. I vacillate between two approaches. One is a kind of laissez-faire approach where I try to show kindness and broad tolerance for minor infractions of classroom rules (e.g. speaking out of turn, having "off channel" conversations with friends, getting up and moving about). The other is to be fairly rigid about it, and "exile" students (ask them to leave the classroom and go sit at the front desk for a time out) who misbehave repeatedly.

My dreaded, worst situation, however, are those times when I ask students to leave the classroom, and they simply refuse. They sit like a stone and do nothing. That turns into a showdown, which always leaves me with an awkward situation. Do I forcibly remove the child, so as to be consistently applying my "exile" rule? Or do I back down and try to take a different approach, which makes me inconsistent and where I worry the kids take the lesson that I can be "out-waited"? 

It's a horrible situation, that simply seems to have no good solution. And I'm not consistent in how I deal with it, either. So I just feel like a really crappy, inconsistent teacher when these situations arise.

And then after dealing with it, in whatever way I did, I feel guilty that I did the wrong thing, afterward.

It's depressing.

[daily log: walking, 7km]

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