Tuesday, November 5, 2013

Measuring your moments

Once every couple of years, the need arises to chew out your students. Even the best ones.1 2

Sometimes it’s due to a lull in effort. Or a premature splurge of senioritis. Or a general lack of respect for the classroom.

It’s not something I particularly like to do, because if you know me well, you know: When I get angry, I really get angry. And that is a side of me that I do not like to show unless it is absolutely unavoidable.

Plus, the last thing I ever want to do is make a group of good kids feel bad about themselves.3

It’s not something you can do more than once a year, because once you’ve used up that well-measured moment, any subsequent occurrence becomes a droning act of beating a dead horse – they just tune you out the second time.

It is in moments like this, when I am weighing the complexity of the delicate balancing act of how to walk that fine line of encouraging vs conveying a sense of fervent urgency to your students, when I cannot comprehend how parents deal with raising kids. I imagine it is this times a few thousand billion.

Is it them?

Or is it me?!

(Am I not teaching/raising them right?)

UGH!!!

. . .

In other words… this is about the time of year where things really starts to feel like an uphill battle.

Turkey break cannot come soon enough.

  1. Sometimes, especially the best ones. []
  2. One particular moment I remember was in 2009-10, when my Pre-AP Algebra II students got extraordinarily good at skipping anything resembling a word problem. []
  3. Again, this hearkens back to 2009-10. Perhaps I’ll talk about this in February… []