Ooo-oooooo chiiild, things are gonna get easier...

Or are they? No, seriously. It's March. I've been singing this Oo-ooo child song to myself everyday after school for six months now. Is it possible that my theme song is total bullshit?! I shudder at the mere thought! :)

Honestly though, things in my classroom are still pretty horrendous. Sure, now each of my classes might have one period/week (out of the 10 periods that I teach them)that I can nod my head and say, "Eh, that was decent. They were kind of listening, and I think some of them actually got it." But that leaves 9 periods/week of: WTF?! Why are they so freaking opposed to learning something?! Why do they refuse to put forth any effort?!

I SWEAR I'm a relatively interesting teacher. We do role plays, I bring in music, I read them some of my own journal entries, we've done book clubs, I find books, stories, and articles that they can relate to. I mix up group work, individual work, and whole-class discussions. In theory, there should be something for everyone in my classroom. But they don't seem to see it. All of my attempts generate the same response: "This is mad dumb/gay/boring/whack, etc. !"

I'm a teacher, but on days like today, that role falls by the wayside and I become a zookeeper/babysitter/corrections officer. And I make less money than the school janitors and the city bus drivers. But that's a seperate post...

My concern right now is fixing those 9 hellish periods/wk. As much as my kids really piss me off on days like this when they get completely out of control and treat me like crap, I really do care about their education, and I do lose sleep over the thought of them not learning in my class. They're already so far behind in their reading and writing levels. If they don't make some serious progress in my class, they're just going to keep getting further and further behind, and that disturbs me... A lot.

But I think what really keeps me up at night is thinking about the handful of kids in each class who really do want to learn but are getting short changed because there are enough kids in the room who would rather act like turds and keep us from getting through our lessons. There is no worse feeling on earth than looking apologetically at a frustrated student who is nonverbally begging you to shut the rest of the class up so they can learn something. It's an absolutely helpless, awful feeing. I'm thinking of one student in particular as I write this. This girl's eyes never leave me throughout any given class period. She's always attentive, always respectful, always taking notes, turning her homework in on time, etc. Sweetest student in the school. But when her bright, hopeful, attentive eyes get that angry look because the class (and therefor the lesson) has derailed, I want to sit down and cry- or pluck her from the room and go teach her one-on-one, leaving the others to go on being turds on their own time.

I don't mean to sound like I want to give up on the ones who are being turds. If that were the case, I'd have quit a long time ago. Most of my students have a lot of issues that trigger their ridiculous behavior which, in turn, keeps them from learning much in school. So I try to be empathetic of that. I try to just work harder to make the lessons more interesting, or meet with the main instigators one-on-one to troubleshoot. I'm sure that there's a way to 'reach' my kids despite their issues, but I haven't found it yet, and that's giving me an ulcer. Things do not seem to be getting much easier. :(

But I'm going to keep singing that song because it makes me happy.