Murphy’s Law states that:
Murphy’sMcIntyre’s Law
As It Applies to
Behavior Management
Popular Books On Behavior Management
1. The first myth of "quick and easy" discipline is that it actually exists. (Quick and easy discipline isn't.)
2. Any behavior management book offering “sure-fire” or “quick-fix” strategies should be filed under “fiction”.
3. While reading about "Research-based Practices" and "Applied Behavior Analysis", the reader will be unable to shake mental images of white rats using palate & brush (made from push bars at the end of mazes) to paint-by-numbers.
4. Any “new” technique or discipline plan is simply a renamed old one. The originator of the initial strategy will be given no credit by the authors of the "new" idea.
Your Student
5. Your worst behaved student will have a perfect attendance record.
6. Any positive behavior you have instilled in a "difficult" student will disappear over the holiday break.
Fellow Teachers
7a. Any progress you have made in motivating a difficult youngster to make better behavior choices will be destroyed by the teacher she sees next.
7b. The teacher she sees next will vehemently defend his practices as being “necessary to teach her a lesson”.
7c. If the administrator treats that mean teacher like he treated that student, the teacher will file a union grievance.
Schoolwide Discipline Plans
8. The degree of effectiveness of a disciplinary intervention is inversely proportional to the level of management that devised it.
9. School-wide discipline plans are typically devised by uninformed individuals trying to manage what they don’t understand.
10a. If the teaching staff has developed a thoughtful, positive, and effective school-wide discipline plan, getting district approval will be like mating elephants:
-Its done at a very high level
-It involves a great deal of bellowing and screaming
-It takes two years to get results... 
And sometimes you're crushed by the results.
Little known fact: The term "red tape" refers to the time after the U.S. Civil War when former Union soldiers had to go to Washington to seek funds owed to them. Their hard-to-locate service records were bound with red tape.
10b. If an effective and positive school-wide behavior management is placed into practice, the teacher who would most benefit from using it will file a union grievance.
10c. After intensive and expensive training, and under the most rigorously controlled circumstances, tenured teachers will do as they damn well please.
10d. Despite implementation of expensive and complex comprehensive systems for peer mediation, conflict resolution, and anger management, the best method for resolving disputes will still be 'Rock, Paper, Scissors'.
Sending A Student To The Office
11a. Any student sent to the office for discipline will immediately display worse behavior upon return to the classroom.
11b. Any student sent to the office for discipline will be treated like a visiting dignitary by the office staff. He will then be filled with cookies and other baked goods before being asked to run off photocopies.
11c. While unsupervised at the copy machine, that student will photocopy his buttocks.
11d. Later in the day, a photocopy of a rear end, turned sideways, will be found on the teacher’s desk. Across the image, now sporting inked eyes and nose on the upper cheek, will be scrawled the caption: “Mr. McMeanie's big smile.”
11e. When the class is asked who placed the photocopy on the desk, all fingers will point to the gifted kid with Aspergers Syndrome.
11f. When the psychologist in the disciplinary meeting mentions the gifted student's Aspergers Syndrome, the parents will overhear Mr. McMeanie whisper “Yeah…pain in the Assperger's Syndrome".
Administrators
12. Trying to get an authoritarian administrator to consider positive practices is akin to trying to ski through a revolving door. You can see your goal, but getting there won’t be easy.
13a. Any behavior management procedure that was here-to-fore unknown to the administrator will be poo-pooed when you suggest it. Any interventions he does suggest will worsen the situation.
13b. If the administrator’s suggested intervention works, something went wrong.
Support Personnel and Others 
15. The main function of bus drivers is to agitate students before they get to school.
16. Any student progress promoted by a positive and effective teacher will be fully neutralized by a negative paraprofessional with 30 years experience who refuses to be transferred to another classroom.
17a. In an attempt to appear knowledgeable, even the simplest of interventions will be explained in a complicated manner by the consultant.
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17b. If the consultant’s intervention works, you failed to follow the steps as directed.
18. Despite advanced training, school psychologists don’t know one millionth of 1% about anything related to abnormal psychology or aberrant behavior. However, that is 100 times more than the rest of us know.
19. The main function of the IEP Team is to make things difficult for the administration and impossible for the teacher.
Assessment and Diagnosis
20. A “Functional Behavior Assessment” is a complex and systematic procedure for arriving at the wrong conclusion with confidence.
21. On the day when the Team finally arrives to your classroom to observe an offending student, he'll be angelic, on-task, and answering every question correctly.
22. Despite every item on a checklist of inappropriate behavior being marked with the highest scores, and despite the student's total score falling into the 99th percentile of aberrant behavior, the results will not meet the district's cut-off score for obtaining special services.
23. When presenting the results of the psychological assessment, the evaluator who just came from a three martini lunch will utter a diagnosis of "Bonkers".
24. Despite the urging of certain faculty members, a strait jacket cannot be considered a "wrap-around service".
25. When your most troublesome student is finally moved to a more appropriate setting, the behavior of the student who replaces him will be 10 times worse. (Submitted by John Nisbet... Thanks John!)
Summary
26. All great interventions were discovered by mistake.
27. Good behavior management is indistinguishable from magic.
28. The key to effective discipline is to work smarder, not harder.
29. Some days it just ain't worth chewing through the restraints and jumping the wall.
Author: Tom McIntyre
www.BehaviorAdvisor.com
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