I had a frustrating organic chem class on Wednesday. The class appeared not to understand or be able to reproduce some of the reactions that we had studied in detail in recent classes. This is normal and expected behavior for many high school classes, but not for an honors class comprised mainly of kids who are in the top 20 in their class (of over 500).
As it turns out, it wasn’t the whole class, but just a couple of vocal individuals. One of the other students in the class sought me out after school and apologized for her classmates’ behavior. This student pointed out that she and the other students who had been keeping up with the assignments and classwork were on top of the material, and that she was frustrated that a few kids who weren’t keeping up appeared to be blaming me instead of taking responsibility for their own understanding.
This was completely unprompted, and was in fact the first time I had received any feedback at all from this particular student. It also happened to be just what I needed to hear.
