How to Start Class
by Joshua Gibbs
When you think of class “beginning with a bell,” you probably think of a digital bell that is programmed to sound in every school classroom at exactly 11:00 or 1:02. You remember this bell from the public school of your youth, and it only added to the institutional quality the place already had. The sound this bell produced was not melodious, which is why no one said it “rang.” Rather, it “went off,” sort of like a bomb or a dropped handgun. This bell served one purpose: determining who was and was not tardy. Oddly enough, the digital bell did not actually signal the beginning of class, for a teacher might keep working on something at his desk for five full minutes before wandering to the front of the room and saying, “I guess we ought to get started.”
There are few opening remarks that are less likely to inspire confidence than, “I guess we ought to get started.” Nonetheless, scores of teachers open nearly every class period with these words or something similar. The fact that a prayer or catechism is recited after “I guess we ought to get started,” doesn’t make it any less dispiriting and helpless a thing to hear. Imagine someone saying this to you at the beginning of a date. Or a concert. Or an operation. Imagine the director of a play hollering these words into the hall at the end of an intermission.
There is a better way to start class, of course. It’s the old way of starting class: with the ringing of a bell.
Not an electronic bell, but a real bell made of metal—a handbell, perhaps twelve inches tall or so, the sort you imagine a teacher having on her desk in a Norman Rockwell painting.
When students come into class, allow them to chat and shuffle their things, but everyone should understand that when the bell rings, they find their seats and stand to pray and recite the catechism. Likewise, when class is over, do not say, “I guess our time is up,” or “I guess we should pray and dismiss.” Ring the bell. Let this be the understood signal for everyone to stand and pray. When the prayer is over, so is class.
If class doesn’t begin with a sign that everyone understands and respects, the teacher is left asking students for permission to get things started. Sometimes he is reduced to begging. When I was in grade school, students feared a teacher who became suddenly silent. The teacher is silent! Oh, no! He refuses to go on until we are silent, too! And yet, I have found the modern crowd of students is apt to let a silent teacher remain silent until he demands everyone else be silent, too. A silent teacher is no longer intimidating. Really, teachers are not allowed to be intimidating anymore. They have to be affirming, friendly, encouraging, lenient, generous, nodding, praising, and understanding, sort of like Olive Garden waiters.
Until this changes—and even after it changes—teachers need a different set of tools for classroom governance. The high school classroom needs to be a place of ritual, tradition, convention, form, and ceremony, all of which are better means of maintaining decorum than a stern eye, even though there’s nothing wrong with a stern eye. When the habits of classroom decorum are formal—standing together, sitting together, reciting together, addressing one another by surnames—they create a mood, an ethos, which is far more effective in regulating and elevating behavior than an abstract credo like, “In this class, we believe our classmates deserve respect.” The teacher’s expectations for student behavior need to be habits that are practiced daily, not rules that are benignly restated whenever they are broken. Even if, “I guess we should get started,” is effective at getting students to quiet down, the ringing of a bell is a better way of beginning class. It’s a thing that’s done, not merely a thing that’s said. When class is all talk, it’s a meeting. But bells ring in churches.
