Today was a day where I asked myself two big questions. I guess getting back into this writing stuff isn’t so hard, but then again I like to write. It was just hard for me to put the thinking cap back on after two weeks of being off.
How do you make kids care about their education? I see some of these students walking around and they couldn’t give a crap about their education. When I talk to some students about their classes, some of them just blatantly say how much they hate school/homework/classes/etc…I just wish some of these students had the ability to see where their life will be in five or six years and how they will probably think about how they wasted their education or they should’ve just cared a little bit more. How do you get this point to the kids without shaking them and saying “Can’t you just see!” I guess all you can do is be the teacher that they need to get them back on track. All you can do is love on them and be a guide and a mentor; be there for them to encourage them and support them.
How do you get over the fact that you just won’t reach every student? That is one of the things I really struggle with. I feel like I failed those kids who “just don’t get it.” Sometimes I find myself trying to reach out more to those students and leaving the others behind. Is there a happy medium? Is there a point where you just settle and think “there is no getting through them?” I don’t ever want to get to that point. It is what fuels me to be better at what I do. Maybe today they didn’t get it, but there is not telling what tomorrow will bring.
I am definitely not in my little bubble anymore. I can’t expect everything to be perfect because there will be that one incident, that one student, or that one lesson (perhaps multiple) that just won’t go as planned. No more protected societies such as what I had in high school and even now in college. This has been a wakeup call to what the future could possibly look like. Do I like where I am going? Sometimes I struggle with what my calling is and if I am on the right track. Guess I’ll never know until I get there!
Today’s first class was half decent. We started our Gaelic football unit. Of course I had a little bit of resistance from the students. I think this comes from the students never participating in this activity before and it not being an activity that they wanted in the first place (they wanted more traditional sports). We went over the basic rules to Gaelic football and I demonstrated some of those rules. After that, we went ahead outside and practiced for the second half of the class. We just worked on hand passing with partners and finished with playing a small game working only on hand passing. Just like with the dancing, it took a while for the students to warm up to the activity.
This class really solidified what we are doing here and the differences between the morning classes and the afternoon classes. The dynamics are dramatically different between those classes who did the co-created curriculum and those who did not. I have a lot more respect from the students in the afternoon than with these students in the morning. The students in the afternoon also try a little bit more than the students in the morning. The benefits of what we are doing can be seen in the differences between students. Yes, grade level and maturity will play a role, but it is working for the majority of the students and therefore shows that this process really does work.
This week has been a hard one to get through because we also changed classes again. The first two weeks I got to know one class and this week it all changed. That is another thing I have to keep into perspective. These students don’t know my teaching style and I don’t really know them yet. When talking to the students about having to take a test on the rules and benefits, one student said “Grades don’t matter. It’s only PE.” I informed this student that it will matter and it could mean passing or failing this unit. This will take some time. I hope it just doesn’t take the rest of this semester because it will be gone before you know it.
Today has just been an emotional day. This second class is a hard class. It is hard to go from a small class of 20 and things working out okay to a huge class of 35 and students not wanting to participate. During this class, I just wanted to cry! We also did the introduction to Gaelic football and worked on hand passing. When outside and giving instructions on hand passing, halfway through this part of the lesson, I just wanted to give up, collapse on the floor, and cry. I felt like it was a hopeless cause; these students just aren’t going to get it. It’s no wonder that some of these teachers have settled to doing inappropriate activities and really don’t care about their students.
It would be so easy to just yell at the kids to shut up and sit down because you become so frustrated, not only in your teaching but in their behavior as well. It is so easy to be lazy. It is so easy to be mad. It is so easy to be bad. It is so easy to do things that are not for the good of other people, but I am in a position in which I can’t get into that kind of teaching mode. I have to keep thinking about my students and how it’s not just about me. So, I kept trudging through the lesson. I think it is just my management style and the way I give instructions that cause the students to be off task and be resistant to the activity. I think that I will always go back to reevaluating my teaching strategies before I blame the problems on the kids, because more likely than not, it is the way that I am teaching. Things can always be improved on my part to make the class run more efficiently and smoothly.
We had a lock down right before the start of 5th period. This cut a considerable amount of time off of the class. It probably took away some 20-25 minutes until the students got dressed and did their stretches. However, since we were cut on time, I just decided to do direct teaching with them. We did the Cupid shuffle along with the partner mixer. I find that the mixer part goes a lot better when you have students changing partners every 30-45 seconds. This class liked participating in this activity and I could tell that the majority of them were engaged in it. However, there were a couple who didn’t want to hold hands and I just settled with being okay with it.
I left today thinking that you just have to look at each class as new, regardless of how bad they were the last time. You also can’t carry over your emotions and feelings from the previous class into the next one. There is no need to take it out on the next class when they weren’t the ones at fault. I like to compare it to the elementary kids. You can yell at those kids one moment and you will still be their best friend at the end of the day.
The only thing that made this day better was one girl seeking me out before the advisory period. She was in the advisory class on Monday and was part of the group that I taught sign language to. She wasn’t in PE today and she didn’t have the same advisory, but she still came to find me. She wanted to show me that she had been practicing her fingerspelling. This made me so happy. On a day where I questioned students’ level of caring about their education, I had this students standing in front of me and showing me that she had been practicing. Mind you, she is one of the students who doesn’t really care about her education. She told me that she had wanted to learn sign language for a long time. This was one of those moments that definitely trumps the feeling of leaving one student behind because here I got to that one student! What a great feeling it is!!
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