This is kind of a stream of consciousness post. The school year has been in full swing now for long enough to start to get to know and understand several of my students as people rather than names in a grade book. Also, the first of two nights of open house was last night, so I got to meet several of my students’ parents. Here are some snippets:
One student recently told me, “Yours is the only class I look forward to this year. I’ve always hated science, but I love your class.”
At parents’ night, I had a perpetually long line waiting to talk to me, and I was meeting with parents nonstop from 5 minutes before open house officially started until 25 minutes after it officially ended. Usually that only happens when the students are doing badly or there’s some other problem/concern about the teacher. In this case, it turned out to be some parents who wanted to see whether their kids were doing their homework, and a lot of parents who had positive things they wanted to say and wanted to meet me in person. Evidently, the reward for excellence is a lot like the punishment for incompetence.
Today I had a student come in for a re-test. I had met his father at open house last night–a nice, easy to talk to parent who is definitely interested in how his son was doing in school, but in a way that’s encouraging and supportive, rather than demanding. The kid is a lot like his father, and is one of the better students in my C1 (middle of the bell curve) classes, and he eagerly participates in class. When the student arrived, his mother called him on his cell phone–she was waiting for him in the parking lot, and was not happy when he told her that he needed to stay after school to take a test–I could hear distinctly every word she screamed into the phone. He saw that I was surprised, and said, “Don’t worry. I’m used to it. She’s been like that all my life. It used to depress me a lot, but I’m a lot better this year now that I’m on medication for it. Things are really tough financially for my dad right now, but I’d much rather be hungry at his house than get yelled at constantly at my mom’s house.”
Yesterday, one of the other chemistry teachers had left one of her tests on the copier. Being naturally curious to see one of my colleagues’ tests, I looked it over. I was appalled at how easy it was. If that test was the norm for the school (which it seems to be), it’s no wonder that the kids are so surprised at how “hard” my tests are, and why they tend to perform so badly on them.
