Quarter One

First quarter ended on Thursday. Looking at the grades brought me one step closer to abandoning the teaching profession. I have already started thinking of other career paths I'd like, ones in which I am not held responsible for other people's laziness. After the report cards arrive, I'm sure I'll get a barrage of emails from parents angry with me for the grade. There is little blame put on the student in such matters. I say something similiar each time:

I put all assignments online.
At the start of each unit, I give students a schedule of the next 3-4 weeks of assignments.
I am available to help tutor kids before and after school, but I have not had many come in.

Still, it is not sufficient for some reason. We are raising a generation of young people to shift responsibility and work off of their shoulders onto others. In the short time I have been a teacher (six years, ten if you count my alternative school time), I sensed the decline grow steeper. By this, I mean that students are getting better at not learning. Now, I am not idealizing the good ole days when I worked on lessons in the wee hours of the night. "Three's Company" and Spiderman comics were more interesting to me than reading Huckleberry Finn and filling out worksheets on geometric problems. But, when my poor grades arrived, my parents blamed only one. Me. I couldn't imagine my mom calling the teacher to complain about my D in English, citing the problem as "Ron feels that you don't like him," or "Ron was quite busy around the house. I am to blame for that." I have heard both of these excuse sitting on the other side of the teacher desk, let me tell you. When parents do this, a powerful– and damaging – is learned.

I want kids to enjoy my classes. With this, I want them to earn good grades. But I cannot work harder on their grades than they are. They are the ones that need to do the assignments. I'll help, of course, but I'm not going to give As automatically. If they are involved in sports, they need to work harder to make up missing assignments. [Note: I continue to desire to work at a school without sports. I believe that if schools removed those programs, the academics would improve. Both schools I've worked at state that "academics comes before athletics," but neither of them do that. If coaches stopped with the "dumb jock" stereotype, perhaps students would, too.]

Thus ends the invective.