I guess I did have a writing workshop in which the professor started slamming his head into a desk. It did restore order pretty quickly - maybe I’ll try that.

Also I know that it’s hard to be authoritative in front of people, but in my limited experience of having to tell off my students you’d be surprised how easy it is to get students to treat you as an authority figure. I mean, I usually feel like an idiot whenever I have to tell students off, but they usually fall for it completely. I think there’s a much larger presumption of authority when one is the teacher on the part of students than it feels like from the front of the room. I mean, imagine the teacher most like you in front of the class from when you were in Carleton/etc., and then imagine how you’d have reacted if he/she’d stopped class to tell people they were acting inappropriately and had to do something different. (I know it’s cheap to shame students in class for, say, ‘preventing other students in the class from learning’ and so on - but remember, even when you were a student and old enough that you thought it was a cheap move it still worked really well.)

I think you’re doing really well as a teacher– just your students are the worst in the school. To steal your own metaphor (for albeit a different situation)– this isn’t the Dead Poets Society and you aren’t Robin Williams. All in all, it’s just a job after all…