“J – posture check. Sit up. Stop drawing on your arm. That’s your first warning. J – stop writing on the desk. Are you really making me form these sentences? J – stop making faces at D.”
I said these words daily in my classroom without fail. J never really acted out in any real way. He never talked back, never said mean things to classmates, never outright disobeyed my directions. Yet his crimes were the most heinous after I spent hours planning my daily lessons – he wanted nothing to do with my class. He disengaged in every lesson and clearly couldn’t care less about what we were doing, and his grade reflected that.
It didn’t make a lot of sense to me. I had a good relationship with his mother (we spoke on the phone at least once a week, and she helped make sure his homework got done in a timely matter). I spoke with him about his interests and tried to incorporate them into the readings I chose or the topics for writing. I spoke with him about his future, and he seemed serious about going to college and doing well. I knew that he lacked interest in the subject material, but I still couldn’t figure out if his reading and writing skills were below where they needed to be, or if he simply wasn’t trying.
Then I got my answer. He scored higher on the midterm exam than almost every other student in class. I was floored. I decided to confront him about it.
“J – you got one of the highest grades on this exam. Why do you think that is?”
“I don’t know Miss. Maybe I tried harder than I usually do.”
I thought so. J’s mother told me that he had a history of getting lazy in classes and that he didn’t always put his best foot forward in classes. It was after seeing this spike in his grade that I decided to really put my foot down. If he tried to turn in sub-par work at the end of class, I told him that he needed to sit with me at lunch to try again. If he didn’t turn in homework, I told him he needed to get it to me by the end of the day no matter what. I chased him down before school, during lunch, and after school. As far as I was concerned, J wasn’t going to fall between the cracks anymore.
His homework grade improved dramatically after the midterm. And although he didn’t do quite as well on the final exam as I felt he should have, I think he saw the correlation between hard work and success in some small way in my classroom.
But something doesn’t sit well with me. I didn’t push J from the beginning to turn in that homework or to re-do his classwork. Of course, I didn’t know his personality very well at first and it took time to establish that relationship. And I often struggled with whether or not I was babying my students too much. Now, I wish I had thrown that thought aside a bit more. The fact of the matter is that I had four weeks to help J, and I definitely could have done more.
Hindsight always being 20/20, that fact is neither here nor there. J taught me that I need to expect more of my students from day one than I did this summer. For that, I am grateful. I can’t let my students do sub-par work, and come next week, I won’t.
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