Rockin' Some Semantics

Alex's classroom has a Rockin' Behavior Chart.  It's a guitar that has different levels of good and bad behavior.  Example:

The way it works is the guitar is cut out and hung on the wall.  Each kid gets a clothespin with their name on it, and everyone starts out each day on green, a.k.a. Let's rock 'n' roll - You're ready to learn.  Then, throughout the day, each kid can "clip up" or "clip down" as a result of different behaviors.  At the end of the day, everyone colors in a star on their star chart that corresponds with the color on which they ended the day.  Obviously the goal is to be on red, which is completely counter intuitive to me, but that's neither here nor there.  I like that it is a fluid behavior monitoring system, but sometimes a rough time right before the end of the day can give a skewed result of an otherwise good day.  But then again, if you have a good enough day to be up to red, you would REALLY have to screw up to get down to a bad ending point.

Anywho...Alex did really well with this system.  Did really well.  Until the new teacher took over.  The teacher he had for the majority of the year had a baby, so now they have a long term sub for the remainder of the school year.  She is nice and an accomplished teacher, but she is very different.  She has the same expectations of the kids, but as every person is different, every teacher teaches differently.  And my little monster isn't a huge fan of big changes; can't imagine where he gets that from.  Needless to say, we haven't seen many days of ending up on red.

Last week was a rough one in particular.  He started the week with a green, a purple, and a blue.  Wednesday night I told him his goal was to end each day on green or higher.  He said he understood and would do his best.  Thursday I picked him up and asked how his day was.

"Good!  I landed one notch below blue!"

...

One notch below blue?  So you landed on purple.  Purple.  Or if we're going to play this little semantics game you've started, one notch above pink.  You know, the one you have to go to the principal's office.  One notch above that.

Ya know, I thought this kid was going to be a mechanic or an engineer.  I've changed my mind...he's going into PR.