Why My Classes Like Me

How to control a room of children

🎵 When you’re teaching a class, it can be easy to lose control of the group. Children act as a nuclear reaction. If you overexcite one kid_1, kid_1 bounces off, and smacks into kid_2’s mind, and kid_2 infects kid_3, until the whole class is chasing each other around and squealing.

If you get to this point, cut your losses, the class is over. Play games if you can, have them draw if they will. But you wont be getting much learning done today.

The first hyper person in the room doesn’t have to be you though, it can certainly be one of the kids. You can stop this from happening in some groups, by exercising dominance.

Dxp Vs Pxp

In humans, there are two types of social power; Dominance, and Prestige.

Dominance is like raw power. If you’ve got the biggest muscles, or the biggest brains, or can take down a mammoth by yourself, that is dominance.

Prestige on the other hand, a refined power. It comes from leading people, stepping up, taking responsibility, by making people laugh, and being the type of person others want to be around.

These two types of power, fill up-or can be spent from-your xp bar. In the setting of a classroom, if you yell at your class, and they get quiet, and start working, you’ve just gained dominance xp (Dxp). However, you gained this Dxp at the expense of your prestige xp (Pxp).

If you let your kids call you a silly name, “Kettle”, or “Clayton”, or “Curtain”, then you’re buying Pxp with your Dxp.

Many of the best teachers I have had, have been high in Pxp, while keeping their Dxp levels as hidden as they can. Unless it becomes essential to them that they spend some Dxp on an important issue.

Some of the worst teachers I’ve had, didn’t consider this system at all, or were at least bad at playing the game. And as such, only knew about the Dxp system, and were blind to their Pxp. These were ironically the weakest of the teachers, and my little high schooler brain noticed this.

I took pride in high school, by breaking teachers. I was, to put it lightly, a little fucking cunt. My record for getting kicked out of a class with a substitute teacher was 45 seconds after class started.

I only felt the need to ‘break’ a teacher, when they were high in Dxp, but low in Pxp. After all, if I was a dick to a high Pxp teacher, my classmates would have shunned me, and I’d gain no Dxp by being rude to a teacher. I’d just be bleeding my own Pxp. There were other kids who did attack high Pxp teachers, and we didn’t like them very much.

In this, lay the secret of controlling a class. You must have high enough Pxp, so that a large majority of the class really truly respects you.

This is easy to achieve if you can identify the oldest, funniest, loudest, or most popular kid in the room, and make them like you a lot. Once you’ve done that, they’ll do a bunch of free work for you, increasing your Pxp within the overall group.

The real lesson, is that by having high Pxp, you disable kids like me. Kids who see a high Dxp, and want to disassemble a person, for their own amusement or Dxp gains.