Dispersing the Ducks

Wendy Harris, B.S.

An administrator once shared that she would rather be eaten by an alligator than nibbled to death by ducks. One or two bites from an alligator and it would be over. But a duck-nibbling death could take torturous years! Isn’t it the little things that often drive teachers to their limit? Many times handling the big problems is easier than facing the same annoyances day after day.

Towards the end of one particularly trying school year, I had to face the fact that I had endured duck nibbling for years. In my effort to focus on the big, important issues, such as teaching lessons, keeping accurate records, and handling discipline problems, I had ignored or rather endured little annoyances. Now all the little things had banned together and had successfully sapped my energy and joy. It occurred to me that day that perhaps if I would invest part of the energy I used in tolerating a problem to find a solution, I might be able to relieve myself of some of the little daily burdens.

I was most frustrated in preparing for each day’s lessons. I circled the classroom many times each afternoon pulling materials from my file cabinet, charts from the cupboard, worktext pages from under the counter, and math manipulatives from another cupboard. The solution came easily after only a few minutes of consideration. Move my desk and file cabinet next to the cupboards and stack charts and worktext pages neatly on the shelf beside my podium. I tried the new arrangement. It worked! Now it took about five minutes to pull together all visuals and materials needed for an entire day! One duck waddled away!

Next I considered the weekly traffic jams in front of the cubbyholes when the children returned from a special class. They all tried to put their library books, art project, or music paper into their backpacks at the same time. Backpacks were pulled to the floor, papers were lost, art projects were trampled, and discipline problems began. This was a tougher problem but I scouted around and found a colleague who taught children to place backpacks in the cubbyholes unzipped and with the flaps tucked underneath in an open-mouthed fashion. It took children only seconds to slip something inside. I tried the technique with my class. It worked beautifully and another duck was gone!

The next duck was the read-aloud books read to my class each day. Often I would choose any old book from my shelves to share with the class. It bothered me a lot that this part of our day lacked purpose. Spending fifteen minutes with the school librarian was all it took to disperse that duck! With the librarian’s help I wrote out a list of two or three authors to focus on for each month of the school year. Now I would know what titles to check out each week and could introduce my students to good authors and discuss the types of books each one wrote. To my surprise, the librarian asked for a copy of the list and volunteered to pull the titles to have them ready when our class visited each week! Can you imagine my delight the next year when I overheard one of my first-grade students say to the librarian, "Marjorie Flack is my favorite author. Do you have any more books by her?"

Duck feathers were flying now! I looked for the next duck and quickly found it. When someone needed to speak to me at the end of each day, I would practically have to climb over my lined-up students to get into the hallway. Simple! I retrained my students to line up a foot or two short of the doorway. Now even unexpected traffic could move into and out of the room!

These solutions were so simple, too simple! Why hadn’t I taken time to address the little problems before instead of devoting my time only to topics I considered big and more important? As duck after duck fell away, I found extra class time. It became clear that in the past all the little annoyances had combined and become big and important! Classroom time had been wasted and my energy had been sapped. As a result of some annoyances, discipline problems had occurred, taking up even more class time.

There were many more ducks dispersed that year and in every year since. There always seems to be at least a muffled quack following me. But ever since that first year of duck dispersing, I have made it a practice to allot fifteen minutes to think about how to solve a problem every time I feel the nibble of a duck. Many teachers learn to take care of ducks much more quickly than I did. But I know there are others out there that are more like I was and have their own flock of ducks. To you, I say, choose a duck and look him right in the eye. It may not even take the full fifteen minutes to shoo him away.

Reprinted from Balance, a publication of the School of Education, Bob Jones University. Used with permission of Bob Jones University. Please write BJU Press, for permission to reproduce this article.