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Building solid relationships with your students is, hands down, the most important part of teaching. Every single other aspect of teaching is much much easier if you have put some time into this. But. Every now and then, you will end up with a student that doesn't respond to your respectful but firm boundaries. Sometimes the problem is them, sometimes it's you, and sometimes it's down to forces beyond either of your control.  I had a student like this. Bilal (name changed, obviously) had a very difficult home life, and acted out in school. I tried the usual, followed the behaviour policy to the letter, and quickly learned that all that was happening is he was getting more and more frustrated with me, the school, the work and life in general. Our teacher/student relationship was extremely poor, and getting worse. The lessons I had with him were frequently disrupted.  Then I stopped, and thought. The system wasn't working for this kid. Detentions were pointle...

Your future self will thank you! Hello teacher friends! I hope your summer holidays have been both restful and restorative. Since it's the beginning of the year, now would be a great time to take advantage of the many organisational tools that SmartRubric offers to help you conquer your marking before it turns into a giant snowball/hamster wheel of doom. But first, some housekeeping: For those of you who are setting up SmartRubric for the first time, please check out our series of helpful tutorials and videos to help you make the most of your new SmartRubric account: How to  set up your account and start marking in less than 10 minutes  (<-- start with this one) How to set up your account - more detail and resources How to set up a class How to create a smart rubric How to feed back to students Once you have your account set up, you might be interested in some of the more advanced features of SmartRubric. You can find a list of relevant tutorials here ....