I hit the wall today. No. Literally, I hit the wall. OK. Not literally, I didn’t actually hit the wall. I kicked it. So, I kicked the wall today. I feel like an idiot now that I think about it, but I had reached my limit. It took all I have to not walk out of the classroom and out of the school.
We are at the end of the semester. We have a little over a week and then finals. It doesn’t matter that I have said this about 6000 times. It doesn’t matter that before Thanksgiving I mentioned the amount of time left. Nothing I say really matters.
Today a student comes to my class, during class, the middle of 6th period. He is actually in my 6th-period class, so technically he was absent from class. He comes to me, I am standing at the front of the room going over answers with the class on an assignment and shows me a piece of paper highlighted with all his missing work. He tells me he was with his counselor and she told him to come to ask me for all his missing assignments so he can make them up. I am standing there with my mouth hanging open. There are so many things wrong with this scene. Let’s see if you can find the problems with this scene:
Someone walked into my room to ask for something while I am teaching. A counselor had a student out of a class that he is failing and sent him to my room, to the class he was failing, to get the work he didn’t do when he was IN class. I am being asked, in the middle of my class to gather up these assignments and give them to this student so he can take them back to the counselor during the class he is missing and failing. The counselor is going to help him with this work which consists of several weeks worth of activities and learning done in class with my guidance. When I say that he should be doing this work on his own he then tells me…wait for it…”I don’t know Spanish”. I kicked the wall. In front of everyone, I kicked the wall.
Of course, he doesn’t know Spanish. It is Spanish 1. If he actually listened and put in some effort he would at least know what I taught. If he didn’t have 20 zeros on assignments and 12 percent in my class, he would know some Spanish. But, he can’t do the work by himself and he needs the counselor to help him get the work done, during class time, so he can pass the class. I threw a piece of paper across the room too.
It’s not his fault. Well, it is, but it isn’t. It is our fault. It is my fault. It is the fault of a faulty system. Somehow none of this seems wrong to him. To him, this is all an acceptable way to go about school. The thing that made me so mad was not that he came in and asked for work, but that he was the last straw. He was not the first student to do this in the last few days. But it is not just students. It is parents, it is teachers and now counselors. It is people that make up a part of the system.
Somehow it has become acceptable that students will have a ton of missing assignments by the end of the quarter. Those students will then have an opportunity to do all these missing assignments. I am not opposed to students’ making up work. I am not opposed to students needing more time to do work. But when I watch students sit in my class talking to their friends, putting on makeup, listening to music or staring at the wall I tell them they will not get extra time to make up the assignment they are choosing to not do. I tell them if they need help on it to let me know and I will be happy to help them.
I am shocked and dismayed at what I keep learning and observing. I do think there is a lot more going on here than I am aware of, but I do not know how to fix or solve the problem I am having. Aside from giving them all the answers and not requiring them to think for themselves. Aside from letting them get zeros every day and then get all the work to do at the end of the quarter.
So many things are wrong with what happened, including me kicking the wall. But I do not know how to change it…I know not to kick the wall, but how do I have enough impact to make a change without making a hole in a wall?
Educational Rant 
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