The number one cause of tension in my classroom is temperature.
I have no recollection of it being like this when I was at school. Either the building was always kept at the perfect temperature, or we just endured it without complaint, I don’t know, but there was nothing like the constant complaining that goes on here from the children.
Teacher, hot! Teacher, cold! is the year-round cry, as I’ve mentioned before. What tends to make it even worse is that the others often chime in with their feelings on the matter as soon as the first one starts, and then you’ve got steadily rising cries of “Hot! No, cold! HOT! COLD!”. I’ve tried many approaches in this sort of battlefield situation, from taking a poll and adjusting the temperature according to the majority wish, to getting them to change seats in order to be closer/further from the window/air conditioning, to simply telling them to give it a rest and distracting them with an activity. It can be maddening.
The very worst scenario, though, is when one child starts to whine incessantly about the temperature, when everyone else is perfectly fine, and when I feel the exact opposite way. This is never going to end well. There is nothing worse than when you’ve been rushing around helping children with their art projects all morning, and have sweat-soaked hair clinging to your neck, and one annoying little sod decides that there’s absolutely no need for air conditioning when the temperature outside is about 33°C and the humidity is running in rivulets down the insides of the windows. Teacher, cold! Usually, I try to shut them up quickly (before the others can start) by going over and adjusting the aircon temperature by a couple of degrees, and when I’m lucky that turns out to be enough. The next step is to turn down the fan speed. The next is to move the child. The next is to throw him out of the window in annoyance.
With my older classes, however, things are usually fine – they are much less whiny and their body temperatures seem to be much closer to mine, so the temperature is hardly ever mentioned. When they do on rare occasions announce “I’m cold!”, I nod very seriously and say “Really? I’m hot!” as if we are simply exchanging pointless information, and then move on, and most of them laugh and get over it.
Of course, there’s always an exception. Mine is Lisa of the first grade, a girl who has driven me to despair for many reasons in the past but who is really quite sweet when she forgets to be sulky. For a few weeks now, she’s been going on and on and on about being cold, but she does it using the same monosyllabic level of English as the new ‘babies’ in the first year of kindergarten, which irks me. Cold! she says in a whine. Hot! I reply with a shrug. Cold! she whines again, a few minutes later. I turn up the temperature a little. Cold! she insists after another few minutes have gone by. I turn off the fan. Cold! comes the bleat again, by which stage perspiration is already starting to bead on my forehead. I adjust the aircon by a few more degrees. Cold! she goes again, and her classmates, now fanning themselves, start to look annoyed. I move her as far from the air conditioning unit as is possible without dragging her desk out to the balmy corridor, and her remarks are ignored from that point. I feel I have done all I can, though she sulks for ages because she hasn’t got her way. It is quite clearly not cold in the room when everyone else is sweating, if you ask me, but she seems to expect me to switch on the underfloor heating and give her a fur coat.
Anyway, so today we were having a pleasant little group discussion, and the class was going very well, and suddenly Lisa cleared her throat and said in perfect, clear English: Please turn off the air conditioning, because I am very cold. I nearly fainted. Unless you have been an ESL teacher, you can’t understand how it feels to hear a child put together a sentence like that after having communicated in one-word sentences for the entire time you’ve known her. I almost did cartwheels around the room, and actually tripped over my own feet in my haste to get to the remote and switch off the aircon to reward her effort. Lisa, wow! Perfect! Well done! What a great sentence! Excellent! Good girl! Of course I’ll turn it off!
Obviously by the end of the class I had disgusting sweat patches on my clothes, and I felt fairly certain that I was going to pass out from the heat, but apparently the thrill of a grammatically correct sentence gives me super powers of endurance these days, and I survived.
As she went out the door (and I crawled towards the air conditioning remote like a dying explorer in the Sahara towards an oasis), she dropped a little slip of paper on the floor, and I stooped to pick it up for her. She spun around and hastily grabbed it before I could… but not fast enough to prevent me from seeing what was written on it, in the handwriting of an adult: Please turn off the air conditioning, because I am very cold.
Oh dear. Obviously the thrill was gone. Not only that, but it was replaced by terrible guilt at the thought of the poor child having begged her parents not to send her to that icy cold torture chamber of a classroom where the teacher doesn’t care if she freezes to death, to the extent where they have looked up how to say the necessary phrase and written it out for their poor, suffering daughter. Mind you, if you ask me they should simply give her a sweater or something, for the child is clearly cold-blooded, but still. Now I am faced with the terrifying prospect of the parents coming in to complain about me, or the equally daunting alternative… do I now have to teach three classes a week with no air conditioning?!
This job is more complicated than you’d imagine.
Coffee Helps: The Decaf Years 
You’re so kind to those kids! You have so much patience. I would be the witch and just ignore their pathetic attempts at control. After being thrown out the window they would learn to either bring a sweater or stop pulling my chain.
I just feel guilty because they’re only young and also because I know my body temperature really is much higher than most people’s! Sometimes I worry in case I actually am freezing them to death and I’m just too warm to notice…
I can send you a manky cat-hair-covered jumper for you to give her the next time she complains?
Not a bad idea! If I can find something hideous to offer her, I’ll know by her acceptance or refusal of it whether she’s genuinely cold or not…
Ha! I would have been jumping for joy, too! And don’t despair, maybe after your enthusiastic response, she’ll make an effort to memorize the sentence!
This is an age-old issue of mine, mostly because I am not a sitting kind of teacher. I almost never sit, and am usually up and moving around (I find this keeps high school students, especially, more alert) which means that I am usually much warmer than my students, who are just sitting there. However -cruel dictator that I am – I figure it’s my classroom and therefore my temperature. Of course, I don’t teach small children, so I can afford to be meaner.
Last year, someone abandoned an oversized gray hoodie in my room and – after it sat for weeks unclaimed – I took it home, washed it, and returned it to the classroom, where it became the “I’m cold” hoodie for the fastest-moving cold person. Interestingly, these are always girls. I have never had boys complain much, if it all.
The hoodie thing wouldn’t work with these children. Probably because they’re so small, yes. I know perfectly well that as soon as one complained and put it on, the others would immediately be put out that they didn’t have one. It would not matter in the slightest whether they actually felt cold or not – there would be tears and tantrums and whining until I went out and purchased hoodies for everyone!
The similarity between my infants and your older students, though, is that it is almost always the girls who complain. The boys do occasionally chime in, but it’s usually girls. I wonder if this is a physical difference or a psychological one…
Ack, you’re absolutely right, it would never work. I am just not used to dealing with masses of very small people any more, so I forget these things.
And at last, someone to answer a question of mine: I have noticed that UK English uses the word ‘infants’ to refer to young (even school-age, I think) children, whereas in the US, an ‘infant’ is a newbornish baby, probably one that does not yet walk. And schools/daycares/creches in the US do not use that term, either. They are toddlers or preschoolers or young children or whatever, but once they’re walking, the word ‘infant’ is not involved. Would you pleaaaaase give me the correct UK definition?
Oh, I’ve never even thought about the fact that there’s something odd there! I, too, would say that the definition of infant is a newborn baby. But for some reason we also use the word to refer to the first stage of school – about 4-7 years old. Primary school is made up of 7 year groups: P(rimary)1 to P7. In my primary school, P1-P3 were the “infants” and P4-P7 were… erm, something else. I can’t remember. I don’t know whether that’s official or not, but that age group has always been “infants” to me!
The something else you’re looking for is probably “juniors”. It was in my school anyway – Infants were Year R (Reception) to Year 2 and Year 3 – 6 was Juniors.