How easy it used to be to simply have an interesting set of lesson plans, establish classroom rules and then move on to teaching. The student of today many times comes from a single parent home with little or no rules established there. Television or video games become their baby-sitters, so that parents can have some time to themselves. These children do not know their fairy tales or childhood stories because no one spends time at home to read to them. Parents or guardians schedule too much for these children so that children don't learn to manage time or ever learn how to problem solve. Every problem is solved for the child at home to avoid too much stress or in an effort to show love.

This same child appears in the classroom hungry for personal one-on-one attention that they don't get at home. They will get attention whether it be positive or negative. From a home of "anything goes" to your classroom of rules they come kicking and fighting all the way. Unable to employ any critical thinking skills they resort to laziness to try to avoid school work for as long as they can get away with it. Without any new teacher mentor available, the Principal or Vice Principal appear in your room to see how it's going and see mayhem unleased and simply glare at you as if you had something to do with how these little cherubs act.

Class management books address a child that came from a different time, surely not today, where children were properly treated and loved at home with a two-parent family where one of the parents did not work and was at home with the children to raise them carefully and with love. Because the role of authority figures have changed, because many families do not attend church regularly and get no moral or behavioral training or develop a proper conscience to know right from wrong, many of the times, the child that appears in the classroom today is a loud, demanding, self-interested little terror who has had no discipline, no real caring and no real direction.

Now the teacher must make up for everything that was missing at home in addition to try to get anything educational done in the classroom. Somehow educational standards have to be met by certain times of the year and increasing amounts of testing must be implemented at the beginning and end of each quarter. How teaching has changed and how the student of today has changed. To be an educator today is an enormous task that no one can prepare you for. To try to make a positive difference in the lives of children is more difficult than ever, because of how students have changed.