“I know how you are,” I teased one of my eleventh-graders the other day after the work-work-work had subsided and a few minutes of rare downtime had begun. “You try to act all tough, but underneath it all, you’ve got a heart of gold.”
“If I had a heart of gold,” he said, not missing a beat, “I’d sell it.”
This kid has great comic timing and presence. He was doing a Louis Armstrong impersonation on the way out of the classroom ( “I think to myself what a wonderful world. . .”) that had me and the other students in stitches. But his average? Way, way, way down in the red. And it seems like I care about it heaps more than he does.
I’ve been around long enough to know that lack of success in the classroom does not necessarily translate into lack of success in life. I’ve seen it with my own brother and my own friends, and and I pray that I will see it one day with my own son. But it’s hard to sit back and watch when the one who is set to benefit or suffer eventually doesn’t seem to care at all.
I used to get frustrated with students who didn’t do their work; I took it personally. Over the years, though, I’ve developed a new philosophy. It sounds cold, but it’s actually warmly sound.
“My students’ work is not my responsibility.”
No, the responsibility for students’ work — and ultimately for their success — lies squarely on them.
I will give them the information and the tools they need to complete the assigned tasks. I will assist them in understanding how to complete the tasks, if they require or request it. And I will encourage and redirect and remind and kneel down at their desks speaking in a voice of soft concern. But I will only do my part, and my part doesn’t include fretting over their work.
Allowing myself to step away from the fear (that they will fail, and it will reflect poorly on me as their teacher, for example) and the worry (about the same, possibly) means that my interactions with these clearly at-risk students, rather than being confrontational and leading to further disengagement, will be more positive, more encouraging, and more supportive.
At the same time, I’m not enabling their lack of responsibility. Quite the opposite, actually. I ensure that natural consequences ensue. This means not giving them a 60 instead of a 17 to make sure they’ll be able to pass if they decide down the line that they really do want to do something. This means not allowing them to turn in all that missing work at the end of the grading period, even though the late policy allows for only two days late. This means allowing them to reap what they have sown, to learn a valuable life lesson.
Now, this is not to say that exceptions don’t arise, especially in cases of administrator intervention (Hey, he’s my boss!) or students with IEPs (It’s the law!). And, yes, I have made exceptions on my own in extenuating circumstances. But I think we would all be wise to consider the implications of our actions when we coddle our students too much.
What’s going to happen in the “real” world if they don’t turn in that crucial project? Will they get a promotion and extra time to complete the previous project, thereby causing their former supervisor to work overtime to assure they’ve met the standards with it? (Don’t ask! This one’s a definite thorn in my side…) No, they will likely get fired or placed on probation. And it’s not fair for us to allow them to think otherwise — by our words or our actions.
Educational tag lines like “All students can and will learn” (the motto of my first school district), “Failure is not an option,” or “No child left behind” are preposterous to me. Can learn, yes. Will learn? Well, that’s up to the students. I mean, we can lead them to the water; we can even dunk their heads down in it a few times (just so we don’t touch them); but we cannot force them to drink.
We just have to continue explaining how wonderfully refreshing and invigorating that water is, finding ways to show them that they really do need it to survive, and hoping that one day (maybe even when we’re not looking) they will saunter up to it on their own and find out for themselves.
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Most of my teaching resources are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License, which means you can feel free to use them with attribution as long as you don’t use them commercially. If you’re not sure, don’t hesitate to ask me. Unfortunately, I am currently unable to send out my tests and quizzes, but I am hoping to establish a less time-consuming alternative for this in the near future. Sorry!!
