Monday, January 12, 2004
Oooo the pain...the pane of it all.
Loyal fans of the Invisible Ben may have wondered why our stalwart hero chose not to continue his blogging streak into the weekend and instead retreated into digital oblivion for a few days. Was he off having wild adventures in the depths of the jungle primeval? Perhaps he was jet-setting with some of his Ivy League associates at some of the finest resorts in the world, playing baccarat and sleeping with beautiful women. Or maybe he was just lesson planning his heart out.
The answer, sadly, was the last of these with one slight ommision. It's hard to lesson plan your heart out when your students have already done a great deal of the removal for you.
Case in point, Friday. As I mentioned a week ago I designed some tests for my students to take on Friday. This one was on solutions, mixtures, compounds, and molecules...it's a big unit, and we had been covering it for the better part of a month. I had provided students with a review sheet and informed them the Monday prior that it was to be (as had been the case w/tests in the past few months) open index card! That means no outside notes! Just front and back of a 3 by 5 card. This would generally be seen as quite reasonable! At least it would have been in my day.
But not here. Oh no...it was quite the scandal! My first period class griped that there was too much material to fit on one card. I attempted to assuage them by noting that the point was not to fit everything, but to use the card as a study guide! They bought into this somewhat, and also took away almost all my index cards! I don't know why...they only really needed one. Two at the most! And yet people came into class with up to 7 cards!
Still things went relatively well in first period. Only in last period with the Dirty Dozen did things go terribly awry. Why?
"Because you didn't give us index cards!"
No...I didn't. I admit it. They did not receive index cards from me the afternoon before. Frankly, I wasn't sure I had enough for everyone and besides, I had informed them for the entire week that the test was open index card! Besides, index cards are neither expensive nor especially unattainable.
But the outrage! Several girls flat out refused to take it until I explained it wasn't optional.Two or three of the most troublesome male students took the test, but only in the loosest sense. They took about 10 minutes to read it over, scribbled some half thought out answers and then proclaimed their completion. And then they began to talk.
And talk.
And talk.
The noise grew unbearable. This is a perennial problem with that class. Last period tests on a Friday afternoon could be expected to lead to talking. But it got positively offensive and very noisy, and considering the stress many people were feeling without an index card or adequate preparation, tension levels began to rise.
Finally, in an attempt to quiet down the class, I walked calmly to the door and slammed it. Hard. Perhaps too hard.
Because the next thing I knew, the glass window in the doorframe had popped out, and gashed my hand before landing on the ground.
The good news: It did not shatter and would be fixed on Monday morning.
The bad news: My knuckle was bleeding. I know had a physical scar to match my mental ones. Sadly, I could not leverage the rather bloody, though superficial, cut into intimidating my students into silence. No...they just kept talking. Telling me to get out of their face. Making fun of each other. A mess. A bloody, bloody mess in every sense of the word.
Other teachers came in to cover for me in response to the noise...and I appreciated the support. It did not help to lessen the mental pain, but it did give me a chance to head over to the bathroom, wash off my hand, and call the house of a student who was stupid enough to cheat on an open index card test for the second time in a row. He earned another zero...and will likely fail my course. His stepfather says he considers my class playtime. He'll learn only too late the cost of that sort of fooling.
So to answer the question and draw this rather rambling post to a close...the reason I didn't post was because I was feeling emotionally drained. Hearing my last period class refer to me as the worst teacher ever and an obvious novitiate in the realm of education (My worst behaved student told me that only "rookies" call home to speak with parents...) hurt. And although I could mask my distress relatively well in front of my students, never once yelling or cursing...it still stung.
I spent the weekend mostly lesson planning with only a brief set of respites on Saturday night. A teaching friend held a party at his place, and I got to chat with a bunch of other people in a similar situation to my own. Some faced the situation with depression, some with determination or persistance, others with optimism. Previously, I placed myself in the second category, albeit laced with a heavy dose of cynicism, but after Friday it leaned heavily towards the first. And all the optimistic assessments and good natured advice did little to shake that.
Ironically, only by doing my work could I take my mind off the most frustrating part of it...
Loyal fans of the Invisible Ben may have wondered why our stalwart hero chose not to continue his blogging streak into the weekend and instead retreated into digital oblivion for a few days. Was he off having wild adventures in the depths of the jungle primeval? Perhaps he was jet-setting with some of his Ivy League associates at some of the finest resorts in the world, playing baccarat and sleeping with beautiful women. Or maybe he was just lesson planning his heart out.
The answer, sadly, was the last of these with one slight ommision. It's hard to lesson plan your heart out when your students have already done a great deal of the removal for you.
Case in point, Friday. As I mentioned a week ago I designed some tests for my students to take on Friday. This one was on solutions, mixtures, compounds, and molecules...it's a big unit, and we had been covering it for the better part of a month. I had provided students with a review sheet and informed them the Monday prior that it was to be (as had been the case w/tests in the past few months) open index card! That means no outside notes! Just front and back of a 3 by 5 card. This would generally be seen as quite reasonable! At least it would have been in my day.
But not here. Oh no...it was quite the scandal! My first period class griped that there was too much material to fit on one card. I attempted to assuage them by noting that the point was not to fit everything, but to use the card as a study guide! They bought into this somewhat, and also took away almost all my index cards! I don't know why...they only really needed one. Two at the most! And yet people came into class with up to 7 cards!
Still things went relatively well in first period. Only in last period with the Dirty Dozen did things go terribly awry. Why?
"Because you didn't give us index cards!"
No...I didn't. I admit it. They did not receive index cards from me the afternoon before. Frankly, I wasn't sure I had enough for everyone and besides, I had informed them for the entire week that the test was open index card! Besides, index cards are neither expensive nor especially unattainable.
But the outrage! Several girls flat out refused to take it until I explained it wasn't optional.Two or three of the most troublesome male students took the test, but only in the loosest sense. They took about 10 minutes to read it over, scribbled some half thought out answers and then proclaimed their completion. And then they began to talk.
And talk.
And talk.
The noise grew unbearable. This is a perennial problem with that class. Last period tests on a Friday afternoon could be expected to lead to talking. But it got positively offensive and very noisy, and considering the stress many people were feeling without an index card or adequate preparation, tension levels began to rise.
Finally, in an attempt to quiet down the class, I walked calmly to the door and slammed it. Hard. Perhaps too hard.
Because the next thing I knew, the glass window in the doorframe had popped out, and gashed my hand before landing on the ground.
The good news: It did not shatter and would be fixed on Monday morning.
The bad news: My knuckle was bleeding. I know had a physical scar to match my mental ones. Sadly, I could not leverage the rather bloody, though superficial, cut into intimidating my students into silence. No...they just kept talking. Telling me to get out of their face. Making fun of each other. A mess. A bloody, bloody mess in every sense of the word.
Other teachers came in to cover for me in response to the noise...and I appreciated the support. It did not help to lessen the mental pain, but it did give me a chance to head over to the bathroom, wash off my hand, and call the house of a student who was stupid enough to cheat on an open index card test for the second time in a row. He earned another zero...and will likely fail my course. His stepfather says he considers my class playtime. He'll learn only too late the cost of that sort of fooling.
So to answer the question and draw this rather rambling post to a close...the reason I didn't post was because I was feeling emotionally drained. Hearing my last period class refer to me as the worst teacher ever and an obvious novitiate in the realm of education (My worst behaved student told me that only "rookies" call home to speak with parents...) hurt. And although I could mask my distress relatively well in front of my students, never once yelling or cursing...it still stung.
I spent the weekend mostly lesson planning with only a brief set of respites on Saturday night. A teaching friend held a party at his place, and I got to chat with a bunch of other people in a similar situation to my own. Some faced the situation with depression, some with determination or persistance, others with optimism. Previously, I placed myself in the second category, albeit laced with a heavy dose of cynicism, but after Friday it leaned heavily towards the first. And all the optimistic assessments and good natured advice did little to shake that.
Ironically, only by doing my work could I take my mind off the most frustrating part of it...
