Polly Bath: Sometimes we need to just roll with some of the stuff that’s happening. Talk about attention. It snows outside, it’s like the kids have never seen snow before, right?

“It’s snowing!”

There’s a bulldozer outside, what do you do with that? You can’t compete with it. The best thing you can do with that is tell them all to get up and go to the window.

“Everybody go to the window and then in five minutes, I’m going to call you all back and I want you to tell me five or six things that you saw.”

Then they get to talk about what they saw out there. They settle down and we’re ready to learn.

People always fight me and say, “But that’s five minutes off task.” It is not five minutes off task. It is called five minutes of preparing you to be on task. It’s preparing you for higher learning.