General Observations

I’ve been anxiously awaiting the opportunity to write this update. Most of my blog updates are used to illustrate what I am doing inside the classroom; however, I always have general thoughts that don’t necessarily fit inside of a particular update. Thus, I keep a list of these thoughts and when I have time, I get to write an update completed centered on them. This post is one of those.

In this blog, I’ll try to touch on several issues that have been on my mind:

What do we do with students who are failing a course?
What influences does a co-ed have on the education of its students?
Is there a place for uniforms in schools?
What to do with a student who misses a third of the class?
How do you communicate with irrational students?

Now, that I think about it, I will probably have more questions than answers… but I think someone said, the more you learn, the more you realize that you don’t know. That certainly has been the case for me. I’ll try to follow the pattern of topic, background and my thoughts.

Topic number one… students who are failing…

Here I am not referring to a student who is doing poorly at the beginning of the term and has hopes of recovering before the end of the year, rather I am referring to students who are so far in the hole that they have no chance to pass the course. In my high school experience and my experiences at YHS, it seems that students who are going to fail a class have no interest in contributing to the class and primarily try to be a disruption. It is very unfair to the students who are interested in learning and doing well that a teacher has to spend so much time disciplining students who aren’t there to contribute to the class. The students who aren’t beyond the point of return simply don’t care.

Perhaps it would be nice to remove these students from the class in which they are failing to a smaller class that is accelerated. In this smaller class, the students could receive more personal attention and try to catch up. Maybe the student wouldn’t be allowed to leave the class until they could pass an exam that demonstrated an understanding of the material that they had failed. Passing this test couldn’t completely replace their failing grade, but it could start them off at a C. This way the student would be able to work his way to a better grade a have an incentive to stay focused.

This topic brings me to another point that’s frustrated me since I have been at YHS. In Mr. Sowder and Mrs. Porter’s classes, there are brilliant students who in the proper environment would surely be great mathematicians, scientist, doctors, etc. Unfortunately, these students are not given the proper nurturing because the teacher has to spend so much time on students who are capable of succeeding but require so much energy and attention from the teacher. I can sometimes visually see the frustration and annoyance on the brighter student’s faces as the teacher spends valuable class time disciplining non-productive students. The student must recognize how awfully unfair this situation is. In an environment, where the goal is education, those interested in learning receive little attention, while those whose aim is to disrupt learning receive lots of attention.

I think it would be a nice reward for the motivated students to allow them to have classes all to themselves. I imagine a class filled with the well behaved students. The teacher would probably get through much more of the material with much less stress. Also, maybe this would allow the size of classes to be larger because discipline wouldn’t be as much of an issue. Larger class sizes in one area leads to smaller classes in another, the students who do have trouble staying on task. If I could open my own school, there would be classes with less than 10 students, that were for disruptive students. Often students become disruptive because they are bored or don’t understand what is going on in the classroom. Once a student is engaged, they aren’t disruptive. I think the small class size could address this issue.

Well… I now realize that each topic probably warrants its own post. I will try to discuss a topic a week in addition to my normal updates. Let’s just consider those topics a preview of what’s to come!