Slice of Life: Frustration Levels

(This is part of the Slice of Life project at Two Writing Teachers)

There’s a teacher at my school whom I respect greatly for her love of children and her teaching ability and style (I want to be like her when I grown up), but she often reminds us that, “I refuse to do more work than the student,” which is something she doesn’t quite mean (she does plenty for her students) but which hits at the issue of student responsibility. Yes, I — the teacher — have an obligation to help them learn, but they — the students  — too, have an obligation to learn and grow, too.  One rarely succeeds without the other.

I was reminded of this yesterday when the majority of one of my classes of sixth graders had failed to do a very  simple homework assignment given five days ago, even after having time to work on it in class on the day it was assigned so that I and my student teacher (who actually assigned it) could help them as needed. This followed on the heels of some other work not being turned in by much of the same class when I was away on Friday. Now, this class has a number of students with documented organizational issues, but this was just too much for me to let slide.

I know I have a cold and my head is tired, but I sort of lost it for a bit in class and took them all to task, hard, for not striving for the highest bar instead of the lowest, which some of them seem to be doing already (and spring isn’t even here yet!). I reminded them that parent-teacher conferences are next week, and that our report/progress reports are going on soon, too, but that most of all, they were disappointing me and letting themselves down  with their passive work ethic. I expect more of them, for heaven’s sake,

I don’t know if it got through.Their heads hung low and they were listening, but I don’t really know if my words got through.

In another class, I had to pull a student outside in the hallway and give a similar lecture, one-on-one. It has been a continuous string of excuses for not doing any work and I had had it (he didn’t realize that I had gone through this earlier with an entire class, poor kid). He nodded, and gestured a good game, but we’ll see if he follows through. Then, at the end of the day, after checking all of their planners, I reminded my students of a few things they should have already had packed in their backpacks and I was amazed at how many scrambled back to their desks. They would have come into school tomorrow, empty of the assignments but full of excuses about why they couldn’t do the work because they left stuff at school (and watch, there will be one or two who will have zoned me out and watched the classmates get their things and not have figured out that they, too, were missing something. I just know it. Or is my mood affecting me?)

Honestly, I felt like a frustrated babysitter more than a teacher, yesterday, and I am hopeful to see some changes in the days ahead, otherwise, we are all in for a rough patch of “Mr H. Turns on the Heat.” That’s never pretty to be part of, even for me.

Peace (in the my class, please),
Kevin