Two Fun-on-Friday Articles

I read two fun little things today that I thought I’d share with my fellow edubloggers.

These eleven grammar mistakes amused me because I like to think that I know how to speak and write correctly. This list proved that I’ve overestimated my skills – I regularly violate rules 2, 4, and 7, and while I knew the difference between i.e. and e.g., I didn’t know that the use of i.e. required inclusion of all examples. Oops. Just goes to show that even English teachers don’t have it all down!

And these appalling game show answers proved to me that even though my students don’t know simple trivia, they still have a future (as people who show up on Jaywalking). My favorite is probably this one:

Presenter: Which is the largest Spanish-speaking country in the world?

Contestant: Barcelona.

Presenter: I was really after the name of a country.

Contestant: I’m sorry; I don’t know the names of any countries in Spain.

My Students, If Mutants

I was nominated for the local Invitational Seminar of the National Writing Project and need to fill out an application and do an interview before being selected as a participant. If I’m selected, I’ll go to a summer workshop that includes a mountain getaway and earn six graduate credits – credits that actually apply to my degree! – free of charge.

It’s a pretty exciting opportunity.

One of the questions on the application is, “Please describe the students you presently work with and teach.” I had just finished grading a quiz on which the last question was, “If you were a mutant, what ability would you want?” While walking from my classroom to the restroom after school yesterday, I wrote the following response for my application:

When asked what mutant superpower they would like to have, nearly 20% of my sophomores responded that they would prefer the ability to become invisible. A closer look at the respondents shows that they are subdivided into two camps: those (mostly male) who would use their newfound powers for mischief, and those (mostly female, and a larger group) who would use them to vanish forever into the wallpaper. That’s a fact about many of my students that bugs me in contemplative moments. What makes a fifteen-year-old kid want to withdraw from life so badly? What will become of them?

(One girl, to be fair, wants invisibility so that she can hear if people say rude things about them and “kick there booty’s!!”)

The invisible kids are in contrast to the 13% who would choose flight – many for the sheer joy of it, or for convenience (“I wouldn’t have to get a driver’s license”) but some, they admit, so that they could fly far away. From what, I don’t know, but I can guess: poverty, frustrated parents, tedium of seemingly irrelevant schooling, fears about uncertain futures. They’re harder to spot in the classroom than the ones who want to vanish, but it shows up in the inbox when their assignments don’t.

Twice as many girls as boys would like to be able to read minds; more boys would choose mind control, and two of them want it expressly so they can convince teachers to cancel quizzes and tests. The gender split is equal among the 9% who want superhuman strength; most of them are student athletes, but two are meek girls from migrant families, and I wonder what they would do with their powers. Five times as many boys as girls would choose superhuman speed; since they’ve mastered working and moving in slow motion, I’m in favor of this particular mutation.

More interesting is the boy who picked enhanced flexibility so that he would be a better break-dancer. He’s a taciturn young man with relatively little English, handsome with chiseled, aquiline features that lead me to suspect he has Cherokee ancestry. I have a hard time picturing him doing the worm, and I wonder what else is going on inside his head as he struggles to understand the reading.

One girl wants the ability to control others’ emotions. Another wishes she could speak all languages. Another girl, whose eyes are sad even when she smiles, wants to read minds so that she’ll always know the truth of what people are thinking.

One of their male counterparts thinks smaller, and would like to be able to snap his fingers and have all his homework completed instantly. I’m perplexed by a serious young man’s choice of the power to draw himself. Another boy chooses “the ability of absolute feminine attraction”; I suspect he meant “female,” but who am I to judge? 

Sixty percent of the students in my school qualify for free or reduced lunch, and we provide complementary breakfast to everyone; I know many of them attend school simply to get two square meals a day. None chose the ability to manifest food or to never feel hunger. Six, however, wish they could control fire or the weather. It is 28 degrees at night, and many of them have two unemployed parents. 
 
My students make me crazy with frustration when they earn single-digit grades by “forgetting” to turn in any work. They baffle me when they profess, as sophomores and juniors, to have never learned what a verb is or how many feet are in a mile. They gray my hair when they proffer bald-faced lies when I catch them cheating or texting. But my students make me smile when they walk into the room, when they act like hyperactive fifth graders at a school dance, when they come up with some startling insight far beyond their perceived cognitive ability. I’m rarely impressed with their writing ability or work ethic, but I’m often overwhelmed by their heart and by the responsibility I, or some other adult who touches their lives, have in guiding them to become adults.

One of my juniors just told me that he’s going to be a father. I’d bet a shiny nickel that he’s gay. He’s mad at me because I took his cell phone – how was I supposed to know, before he told me, that he was texting the mother as she sat in the doctor’s office? He’s a tender, angry young man whose life, as he’s known it, has just ended. And he is my student.

(And, because I’m a geek – and no, I didn’t include this with my application – here’s a pie chart. Click to embiggen.)

Creative Writing, Part II

I suppose, in her own way, my department head did respond to my queries regarding a creative writing class at CHS. While she didn’t ever get around to replying to my emails, she did think about it and add it as an agenda item for our department meeting.

(In related news: we had a department meeting!)

To shorten a longer story, DH wants to try to get some elective language arts classes into our course offerings. I was surprised that the department immediately nominated me to teach creative writing; on one hand, I have been spearheading the NaNoWriMo stuff, but on the other hand, I’m low woman on the totem pole and c/w is supposed to be a pretty highly desired class. Hey, I’m not gonna argue.

Anyway, she had me write up a proposal, and we’re meeting with the admin next Wednesday. I took some of my ideas from the online publications class I’d hoped to teach last year and combined them with the creative writing curriculum to create a Creative Writing and Online Publications class, covering topics like:

• appropriate email usage
• blogging
• bookbinding
• character development
• creative nonfiction
• digital publication
• digital timelines
• elements of journalism
• forums/message boards
• genre
• hypertext/simple HTML
• literature pertaining to theory/practice of writing
• manuscript submission
• memoir
• NaNoWriMo (of course)
• netiquette
• plot structure
• poetry
• portfolio development
• publishing industry
• revision/publication
• setting
• vocabulary
• web safety
• wikis
• workshopping
• writing for the web

I’m excited. Trying not to get my hopes up, but excited. This would be an amazing class, and I wrote a kick@ss proposal, and I’d love to teach it – so much so that it would make up for almost all of the negatives of being here. Which, of course, raises another question: at what point do Mr. Bees and I start seriously considering moving closer to CHS?

Anyway, I’ll keep y’all posted on how the meeting goes… wish me luck.

Mrs. Bees Reads About Shut-Down Learners

About two weeks ago, I went to the public library looking for books that might help answer some of the “teacher existential angst” questions bouncing around in my head. (That, and a paranormal romance that was just too embarrassing to actually purchase.) One of the books that caught my eye was a slim volume called The Shut-Down Learner: Helping Your Academically Discouraged Child, by Richard Selznick.

I took it home in the hope that it might provide some insight – and tools – for me as I try to connect with some of my more discouraged (and discouraging) students. Sure enough, the shut-down learners (SDLs) that Selznick describes are frequent inhabitants of my classroom. I have to return the book this afternoon, but I found it helpful enough that I wanted to talk about it here in case it might come in useful to my blog-friends as well. If this sounds like some of your students (or your children) please go check out or purchase Selznick’s book. I think you’ll find it worth your time.

Identifying Shut-Down Learners in Your Classroom

Male SDLs in your classroom will likely be easier to identify.  They’ll be the kid who tries to hide, who slouches, avoids eye contact, and will do anything to keep from being called on. They act up in class, decline to do their work, and end up with single-digit grades in your class. They’ve often been labeled as ADHD. More male students than female tend to be SDLs.

Female SDLs are tougher to identify. They often exhibit “teacher-pleaser” traits: pleasant, friendly, helpful, vivacious. They’ll probably end up with higher grades than their male counterparts because they appear to be “trying.” They’ll often work overtime to fit in or seem more like the popular girls.

SDLs seem unmotivated to learn and become disconnected from the classroom activities. They exhibit extreme dislike for reading and writing, and seem to gain nothing positive (intrinsically or extrinsively) from their school experience. This often manifests as anger toward the school system.

These students are often diagnosed (wrongly, or incompletely) as ADHD.

What’s the Real Problem?

Selznick calls SDLs, especially the boys, “Lego kids.” They tend to have excellent visual-spatial intelligence, and will spend hours doing complicated kinesthetic tasks. They score very highly on tests where they have to discern graphic patterns. Because these skills are emphasized in the earliest grades, SDLs may be initially identified as gifted.

The underlying problem for SDLs is very low linguistic-verbal intelligence. They have severely underdeveloped vocabularies, and significant deficiencies in reading fluency and/or comprehension.

After the first year or two of school, opportunities for these students to shine with their visual-spatial skills decrease while demands on their linguistic-verbal skills increase. They can’t keep up, and then they can’t catch up. Suddenly, the gifted kindergartner is the below-average third-grader, diagnosed with ADHD by a rushed doctor, but medication can’t make up for fundamental holes in language acquisition.

By high school, you have a student who is completely overwhelmed, desperately behind, and (sometimes irrevocably) shut-down. They feel stupid and unable to do the things that seem so simple to other students, so in an attempt to shield themselves from these feelings, they either disconnect entirely or attempt to camouflage their deficiencies through excellence in sports and socialization.

What’s the Answer?

Parents and teachers look at a SDL and tend to believe that the problem is a lack of motivation. No amount of motivation, however, can overcome the fact that the student simply lacks ability. (Selznick has a terrific metaphor for this, wherein he compares SDL learners to runners with heel spurs.) When efforts to motivate the student inevitably fail, the adults in their lives get frustrated and angry. Negative reinforcement exacerbates the problem as the student feels punished for something they can’t control. Understanding that a student truly can’t rather than won’t is a key thing that parents and teachers can do to help these students.

The curriculum is another major obstacle for these students, and Selznick suggests something potentially radical (but, to my mind, pretty intriguing). Selznick suggests that SDL students will not thrive under the regular curriculum, because their language acquisition is so impaired. He recommends a more remedial curriculum for part of these students’ education – instruction that will help them overcome the worst of their deficiencies so that they can achieve their adult goals and have confidence.

The other part of their curriculum should have a heavier focus on those areas in which SDL students can excel and have confidence – classes that utilize their visual-spatial and kinesthetic intelligences.

That translates to something akin to vocational/vo-tech education, which I imagine could raise some eyebrows amongst some educators. I’m of the opinion, though, that we’re doing our country and its youngest citizens a stark disservice by minimizing vocational and practical education. Not all students will be college graduates, and if we don’t have people who are expert welders, electricians, mechanics, plumbers, and carpenters (not to mention hairstylists!) what will happen to our world?

Selznick’s recommendation isn’t trying to compartmentalize SDL learners or say that they can’t achieve a “white-collar” future. The fact is, he shows, that many SDLs are happier in jobs where they can work with their hands. They have confidence and success, and tend to excel, because this is where their natural gifts lie. (Re-reading this, I feel uncomfortable, as if I’ve written something racist, bigoted. I need to dig into that reaction a little bit – I guess I’m more conflicted on this subject than I thought! Looking forward to readers’ thoughts.)

Minor tangent: We’ve created an artificial hierarchy, I think, of “good jobs” and “bad jobs” based on whether you wear earplugs and a toolbelt or a suit and tie. I would argue (and I’d bet Selznick would agree) that there aren’t bad jobs, just jobs that are bad for certain people, and that a vocation that brings you satisfaction and lets you make a living is good regardless of the uniform.

Anyway…. You can get an autographed copy of The Shut-Down Learner for $11.95 through the book’s website, or you can find it for the same price through Amazon (with used copies as low as $3.58). You can even preview the book for free by requesting the first chapter here, or look for it at your local library.

Disclaimer: I’m not affiliated with Selznick or the book publishers in any way, and am not getting compensated in any way for this post – just wanted to share a good find with other teachers.

Am I Insane?

Over a week ago, I received a group email asking English teachers to look over the class descriptions before they were finalized for the new registration packets. In looking over them, I found that the other two high schools in our district offer a creative writing class.

Part of my recent teacher-existential conversation with myself has been the idea that I might be able to make it here – might have the go-juice to power through the depressing side effects of economic and motivational poverty – if I had just one class that was stimulating. Something like a creative writing class, an online publications class – something fun, for kids who actually wanted to be there.

I emailed my department head and asked if there was a reason that CHS didn’t offer creative writing. I figured that it might be part of the magnet school issue – that it just wasn’t an emphasis at our school. More likely, I imagined that it had to do with lack of funding.

She didn’t respond.

I emailed again, rephrasing my question to make it more clear that I was genuinely interested and not just shooting the breeze.

Still no response.

On Tuesday, frustrated, I emailed again and asked if she’d received my emails regarding creative writing.

Finally, I got a response: “I did, but I didn’t understand what you were asking.”

Huh? Was it that strange a question? And if so, why didn’t you ask for clarification? Is this the new age of communication – you get an email you don’t understand, so you just pretend you never got it?

Biting my tongue and rolling my eyes sympathetically at my copy of Miss Manners, I replied and explained my question in the simplest and blandest of terms.

I received no response.

Yesterday, I ran into two of our administrators on their way to a meeting. “Can I ask you a quick question?” I said. “I was wondering if there was a reason that our school doesn’t have a creative writing class.”

They confirmed that it was a budgetary thing – just not enough dollars to make it work. They wanted creative writing at CHS, but money was so tight that it looked like the program was going to get cut at the other two schools, too.

I thanked them, wondering what about that answer was so complicated that my department head couldn’t tell me, and went back to my classroom to confront my crazy idea.

I’m considering writing up a proposal for a creative writing/online publications sort of class, to be taught by yours truly, next year.

See, where’s the cost in a creative writing class? Just hiring the teacher, right? If an English teacher leaves a “core” English class to teach an elective, they have to put those students somewhere – so you have to hire another English teacher.

But if an English teacher were willing to give up one of her prep periods… where’s the cost to the district?

I’d have to have a few things in return. They want all of the English teachers to “move up” with their students, which would mean learning two whole new curricula. I’m unenthused about that to start with, and if I’m sacrificing a prep period, I wouldn’t have time. I’d want to keep my sophomore class, and preferably have no other prep, although I could probably still handle one junior class. I’d need a little bit larger copy budget – that, or a budget to buy books, and I don’t think that’s gonna happen. And I’d want control over my class curriculum for the elective course. In exchange, I’d teach a desireable class for free, and lose one prep period, leaving me with one (85 minute) prep period every other day.

What do you think? Am I nuts?

It Really is a New Semester

I’ve rearranged my classroom so that the desks are in groups of four. It makes it feel larger, and now I can physically get to every single student. The groups have team names, and are competing for prizes like “get out of homework free” cards. They get ahead when everyone has their homework in on time, when no one is tardy, when everyone does well. They have to look out for each other if they want to win. I have so many students who need me to constantly ride herd on them if I want them to do the smallest thing – open their textbook. Bring a pencil. And I can’t satisfactorily clone myself. So instead of me riding herd on them, maybe their groups will? That’s my hope, anyway. Maybe the kid who doesn’t mind letting himself down will think twice before letting someone else down.

I’m taking things back to basics. I’m not assigning another essay for a while – these kids can’t write. We’re looking at nouns right now, and then it’ll be verbs, and then we’ll talk about how you need at least one of each of those to make a sentence, and then we’ll talk about making them agree with one another. No sonatas until they can play their scales.

We’re starting To Kill a Mockingbird, and I have to confess that I’m a little excited. I’ve had a hard time understanding what all the fuss is about – it’s a nice book, I thought, but not the end-all-be-all, right? Except that I felt even more negatively toward The Outsiders, and it turned out to be amazing. Teaching these books gives me an entirely different perspective than just having read them as a pre-teen. I’m excited to see how this goes.

I’m not sure how much of this is going to work, or how long it will work – but I know that I feel more in control of my classroom, and more optimistic about what’s going on inside it, than I have in since the first week of school. I actually feel like I could be okay here, complete lack of support from other teachers or not.

Of course, it doesn’t hurt that three of my biggest pains-in-the-butt are off my roster. Yep – Hyde is GONE. I’d like to say that I’m sorry, but I’m not. My junior class is actually a class again, and it’s a great relief. And Beavis and Butthead, from my B day, are gone as well. They gave me a new “problem child,” but I’m holding out hope that he’ll prove less an issue than Hyde was…

Second Wind

I was all ready to write “Disillusionment: Part 2” just as soon as I had some time to get my concerns down on paper. Part Two was going to be where I spill my deepest, darkest teacher secret: I’m not sure that I believe in my curriculum. In my very first education classes, my professor told us all that every teacher should believe that his or her subject is the very most important subject – and that if you don’t, probably you shouldn’t be teaching (or at least, not teaching that subject). I’ve always been able to form a great intellectual argument supporting the idea that English (or rather, literature and composition) is the most important subject… but on a more practical level, I’ve never been completely certain. See, I took a detour. While most of my peers stayed in classrooms – their own, or the ones in which they took graduate classes – I took a couple years off and ended up working in a manufacturing plant. Your perspective on education gets a pretty good reality check in a machine shop. These men and women don’t need to know how to analyze a poem, read Shakespeare, or write an essay – they need to know how to do their jobs, and they need to know how the world around them works so that they can protect themselves and be “good citizens” if they choose.

I’m teaching, for the most part, students who are in the same boat.

So yeah, I was all ready to write about that. And don’t get me wrong – it’s still on my mind. But before I could get around to writing it, I read four things:

• Walking on Water: Reading, Writing, and Revolution by Derrick Jensen
• another teacher’s thought that hit a little too close to home
• an article about Teach for America and what makes a good teacher (blog entry forthcoming)
• little books that my students made that listed some of their goals for the upcoming year (likewise)

I think I’ve caught my second wind.

There are a lot of thoughts flying around inside my  skull. I’m trying to teach my kids to write essays when they can’t even write sentences. Sure, they’re sophomores – they should have learned this stuff by now. But they haven’t. I’m trying to teach my kids to connect to the real world when they have no concept of the real world. I’m trying to teach them to analyze literature when, honestly, I’m not sure they know how to read.

I’m starting over.

Yesterday, after the kids went home and I’d done all of the grading I could stomach, I rearranged my classroom. Before, I had two blocks of rows facing a center aisle. I liked it. It worked pretty well. But I couldn’t get to everyone, physically, and eye contact was a problem with some kids who faced one another, and when we worked in groups there was too much resistance. I’ve rearranged the room into groups – eight groups of four (my largest class is, hypothetically, 32 kids) plus a two-desk group by my desk for kids who just can’t handle being near their peers.

(Can I just pause to celebrate the fact that one of the main students who would have lived in “naughty child land” is NOT on my class roster for next semester! I’m pleased as punch over that, I am.)

I’ve been inspired to revamp my tenth-grade English classroom by something going on in a fifth-grade math classroom in that magazine article. I’m going to use groups to motivate the students. The biggest issue going on – probably because, again, they’re twitterpated sophomores – is missing work. I’m going to give them group accountability. Rotating group leaders. Rewards for everyone doing their entry tasks – and they can help one another. Rewards for everyone having their homework. Decent prizes – “get out homework free” cards, or candy, or school supplies.

Recently, I became horrified at the lack of basic knowledge in my classes. In fact, after discovering that none of my sophomores knew how many feet were in a mile, and that at least one of them thought Iceland was a continent (and the place where you’d find a platypus, no less) I confess I kind of chewed them out. But it’s not their fault that they don’t know anything about their world. They’re fifteen – that’s only two years older than thirteen, and I didn’t expect my seventh graders to know anything about the world. What magical thing is supposed to happen between childhood and adolescence to make kids aware? Uhm: me.

So instead of being aghast that they’re ignorant, I’m going to fight the ignorance. The new opening routine starts with journals and an overhead. Students copy down a fact of the day – “need-to-know” information about our world. I’m thinking one day I’d like them to have to learn how to tie a tie. Then I’m going to move into grammar basics and sentence construction. Practical stuff: subject-verb agreement, comma splices – things that make you look dumb if you do it wrong in the real world. I don’t think most people need to understand transitive and intransitive verbs, but I think everyone ought to know that a car is quick but a car moves quickly.

We’ll do sentence corrections. Individual, small group, full class. My room feels more spacious now, and I can get to every single student to look over his/her shoulder and help with problems. No kid can hide now – they’ll all be in a group that’s paying attention.

I’m hopeful. I’m really, really hopeful. Not only that this will work, but that it will work for me. I don’t like feeling the way I’ve been feeling.

Disillusionment: Part 1

Paging someone who has the answers…

I’m not 100% certain this is the right school for me.

(Much to my chagrin, and also to my dismay.)

We’re in the last week of Semester 1: finals week. We’re supposed to be giving common assessments to our students – all sophomore English teachers giving the same test, etc. Now, I’m not a huge fan of common assessments, to be honest. I think teachers (okay, GOOD teachers) should be allowed to sculpt their own assessments and units. So I’m okay with the fact that I wasn’t made to use the common assessment. It just seems a little odd to me that we’re supposed to be giving common assessments, but no one ever gave it to me, told me what it was, or checked in with me about it….

Then again, when would someone give me something or talk to me about what I’m doing in class?

It’s January, and we’ve had one department meeting this year. I’ve seen my department head three times all year: at the meeting, and twice in the hall. I’m not sure she’s ever been in my classroom. I haven’t spoken to my mentor since early November. In fact, I hadn’t spoken to ANYONE in my department since early November until yesterday, when one of the other sophomore teachers wandered into my classroom to ask how finals were going.

I know that if November and December are hard for rookie teachers, they’re also hard for veteran teachers. But I think they have to be tougher for those of us who are new at this. I’ve needed emotional support these past few months. One part of me thinks that if I wanted to talk to my mentor or my department chair, I should have gotten up and walked over to their rooms. But surely they’re both getting paid to initiate contact, to look in on me even if I don’t raise my own fuss.

It would be wrong of me not to acknowledge that I have some terrific students, some kids who love to learn and who engage and care. But this is a disillusionment post, so I’m going to go ahead and say it: for every kid I have who cares about his/her future, I have two who don’t. I had nine kids in one class yesterday who refused to do their final. I have an inexcusable number of students whose grades fall below the 25% mark.

Part of this is that I teach sophomores, who are inherently – perhaps biologically – twitterpated. A bigger part of this is that I teach in a school with serious poverty issues; over 60%  of our students qualify for free/reduced lunch, which is more than twice as many qualify in the Urban School District. During my evaluation, I was told that some of my students come to school for two reasons and two reasons alone: free breakfast and free lunch. It’s the only food they get. They don’t care about passing my class – in fact, they’ve probably got a pretty good disincentive to pass, because if they pass their classes, their free meal ticket runs out in four years. (Passing thought: would it be inhumane to require students on FRL to hold a certain GPA – high enough to show that they’re at least pretending to be a student?) And then I’ve got some kids in my classes who are just biding their time until they can be full-time gang members – or full-time breadwinners for their families. School is just some annoying legal requirement that they have to go through with until their sixteenth birthday.

My administrator says that I’m doing a good job, that he hires great teachers who can find a way to reach these students, to give them some kind of future even if they don’t want it for themselves. He says that he believes I’m that kind of teacher.

I’d like to think I’m that kind of teacher, but I’m not sure I am yet. This is my first year teaching solo in a high school, only my second year as a teacher. I’m still trying to learn how to be a teacher at all, much less a Dangerous Minds/Freedom Writer teacher.

I love teaching. I can’t think of anything else I’d want to do with my life (at least, not anything else that comes with a paycheck). But this is so hard, so discouraging, so deflating. What I’m doing this year doesn’t really feel like teaching – it feels like increasingly depressing babysitting.

FAIL

MATH FAIL

Student:   Mrs. Bees, can you tell me how much the final is worth? I mean, I know it’s 100 points, but how much does it count toward the grade?

Me:   It’s 10% of your semester grade.

Student: [Thinks about this.] So that will bring me to a D, right?

Me: [Checks gradebook.] Uhm, since you’ve got a 19% right now? ‘Fraid not.

GEOGRAPHY FAIL

[We're playing a trivia game after everyone finished their final with time to spare.]

Me:   How many feet are in a mile?

Student 1:   Four thousand?

Student 2:   Five thousand and twenty-eight.

Student 3:   It’s eight thousand and something, isn’t it?

Me:   You’re in tenth grade! You’re all in algebra or geometry or better! How can you not know something they teach in first grade?

Student 4:   Because we went to first grade in this district.

ZOOLOGY TRIVIA FAIL

Me:   What animal does cashmere come from?

Student 1:   Uh… a kind of wildcat?

Me:   I’m sorry, that’s not correct. For the possibility of winning those points for your team, do you know the correct answer?

Student 2:   Uh… a lion?

READING/PLANNING FAIL

[I've had a notice, in six-inch-tall letters, on the board for the past two weeks. The notice says that the last day to turn in any work or take missed quizzes is January 11. I've also been making an announcement to that effect almost every day in class. The following exchange takes place on January 13.]

Student:   [Walks into my room.] So, when can I take my missed quizzes?

Me:   [Resisting urge to drop head onto desk.] The last day to do that was Monday.

Student:   Oh.

Me:   It’s been – and in fact, still is – up on the board for weeks, and I’ve told you every day in class.

Student:   [Looks up and sees, for the first time all year, the white board.] Oh.

CLOCK READING FAIL

[Students walk in after lunch on the first day of the last week of the semester.]

Students:   Afternoon, Mrs. Bees.

Me:   Good morning.

[Students look up at clock, mystified.]

Student:   You mean we go to lunch at 10:30?

Me:   Every day….

FLIRTING FAIL

Me:   In your “to do” list, write down at least four goals you have for the upcoming year – four things you would like to do. And please don’t tell me that you want to do anything that I don’t want to know that you want to do.

Male Student 1:   So, my “to do” list shouldn’t just be a list of names?

Me:   That’s correct.

Female Student:   I guess you’ll just have to take my name off your list.

Male Student 2:   Actually, you’re on my “don’t” list.

END OF SEASON SUCK-UP FAIL

Arrogant Student:   What do I need to get on the final to pass this class for semester?

Me:   You’ve got a low D, so you’ll need to do pretty well.

Arrogant  Student:   Okay. Ha, so I basically didn’t do anything in this dumb class all semester.

Me:   I’m aware. [Looks at the long line of highlighted missing assignments in her gradebook.]  How’s that working out for you?

Arrogant Student:   Pretty well, since I’m going to get my D.

[The day after the test, Arrogant Student comes into my room and asks what his grade ended up being. I pull open the gradebook.]

Me:   Looks like… a 59%.

Arrogant Student:   [Suddenly looking considerably less arrogant.] A 59%? What did I get on my final?

Me:   A 52%.

Arrogant Student:   Uhhh… is there anything I can do to bring that up?

Me:   Look, you’ve got eight missing assignments. You could have turned those in.

Arrogant Student:   Can I still turn them in?

Me:   [Gesturing at white board.] The last day to turn in anything was Monday. I’m sorry. Maybe you should have thought of this at some point before the day after your final?

Irresistible Movie Review

Student: Hey, Mrs. Bees, have you seen Avatar yet?

Me: No, not yet. I want to see it though.

Student: It’s so good. You have to go see it. This weekend.

Me: Yeah? Maybe I will.

Student: It’s, like, my new favorite movie. It’s even better than Transformers 2.