True enough Raoul; teaching classes filled to the max with children can lead to a situation where crowd control takes precedence over actually teaching them anything useful.

What I found to be quite useful when I took my first middle school assignment in China, and discovered that most of my classes were filled with around 70 students, was to first establish some ground rules. However, this meant that from the get go I had to make it quite clear to the administration and staff - from the principal on down, that I couldn't and wouldn't function in this environment unless said rules were understood by all. I wrote the rules out clearly, and in addition made it quite clear that there would be consequences if the rules weren't followed. Chief among those consequences, if all else failed, was that I would simply walk out of the class. The principal, at my request, instructed all of the Chinese teachers, who of course taught the same students, to read the rules to them and when necessary to translate them into Chinese.

At the first, sending students outside of the classroom for the entire period was a real shocker for everyone, even though I had told them it would happen. You can imagine the stir it created when it was noted that there were about 10 boys standing outside my class. Later, if anyone was asked to leave, it became a funny situation for the rest of the class. They started to follow my lead from prior days when I would say, "bye, bye now" in a lilting almost mocking voice. Whenever I ordered a student out, the whole class, in unison, would sing out "bye, bye" and I didn't even have to do it anymore. No one wanted to be on the receiving end of that, and so eventually I never had to send anyone out. Moreover, we actually managed to get things done and the students actually found themselves making progress that they could take pride in.

Of course, as noted above, I had the principal on my side. Not all administrators are as receptive to change - the standard being that our job as foreign teachers is to entertain the rug rats and leave it at that. Empowering teachers to actually teach, and enabling them to establish the discipline to actually do so is definitely not the norm. However, this was a public middle school in a very poor part of China where the parents had to scrimp and save in order to send their children to school. Naturally, they didn't want their money wasted and the kids knew that. The kids also knew that their parents would be informed if they misbehaved - or, at least they believed that would happen anyway.

Leaving that job was one of the hardest things I've ever done. There were tears all around - including my own. Some of those kids will always be in my heart. I never imagined that I could pull it off with students of that age group. (My prior experience had been with adults and international students in America and college students in China.) But the memories of that time period will never leave me, and the relationships I established will always be extremely meaningful.

So, my suggestion is that teachers who find themselves in a situation like the above, should take the bull by the horns. And they should do so before signing a contract. Make it quite clear to the decision makers that you have criteria that must be adhered to or you will simply go elsewhere. I realize that this may sound idealistic to some; however, to those who believe that, I would suggest that compromising your own values is not worth the few kwai offered to you so that you can simply be a clown who's just marking time until the next job pops up.