There are days...and yesterday was one of them...

DISCLAIMER: On most days and at most times, I absolutely love my students. They are the hardest working bunch of kids on the planet, and they generally do what I ask them to do without question. They amaze me daily with how they negotiate between the English-speaking world and their world at home while living in a new culture. They are incredible in their motivation and effort. And I would not trade them for another classroom in the district or even the state. But there are days, and yesterday was one of them...

I was out from school on Tuesday because I was facilitating the CLIMBS workshop for other teachers. My classroom aide and the substitute teacher gave my students vocabulary words from science to work with and also some ESL grammar work and also some math work. We had snow days on Wednesday and Thursday. So walking in to my class Friday was like walking in to a graveyard. It sucked the teaching life right out of me.

After any sort of unusual break (snow days, extended vacations, or even just weekends), the students have gotten themselves comfortable speaking only their first language again. And even the simplest question is met with blank stares. "What did you do this weekend?" or "What did you do yesterday?" become sadly painful questions to ask no matter how many times I ask them. I can even tell my students on Friday that I am going to ask them on Monday about their weekend, and they don't come in prepared to talk about it. I can assign them to draw a picture about their weekend or write some words down about their weekend; when I ask them about it, I still get blank stares as they look from their paper to me and back to their paper again as if a stranger put those words or that picture on the paper. It's maddening.

So yesterday, Friday, when I went in to the classroom, and I put some questions on the board to start their morning (as I always do), I got the expected response from many of them. This is not something I understand. Some would say to me, "If you know that is how they are going to respond, why do you keep asking them?" Well, I guess it is because the kids need to know how to make small talk, and talking about what you did when you were not in school is pretty fundamental to that idea? I don't know. Maybe it's because I think if I do it often enough, they'll get it? You tell me. Pedagogically, there are a bunch of reasons to do it. But in terms of impacting my morale, it's an energy suck.

And then there was the homework. I had their math papers on my desk. They were to name some fractions using papers listing the cardinal and ordinal numbers. They had papers with the cardinal and ordinal numbers on them. 4/5= four fifths. This was after practice, intervention, teaching, examples. I was getting this: 2/2= tow tow. And this was from a student who is back for her second year in my class. They had been practicing all last week that when the denominator is 2, it is "half" or "halves". It didn't stick.4/5 = four fiv.

And the ESL homework? I had four kids out of my fourteen who were in school yesterday who didn't even crack their workbooks. Literally. They didn't even open the book to the pages that they were supposed to have done. And they had two extra days to do them. And one of them was that same student who has now been in my class for a year and a half, and she saw the same material last year.

From the QOD, the math homework, and the ESL homework, I was discouraged. So I assigned a lot of homework for the weekend. Retribution. I don't know what else to call it. At the end of the day, as I was going over their list of homework assignments, one student was shooting dirty looks at one of the offending non-homework-doers. I was thinking that was a good thing. Maybe peer pressure will kick her butt into high gear?

On a side note and for my next post, much of my discouragement was oddly fueled by the FANTASTIC news that a fellow teacher and I are the recipients of a grant that will give us iPads and iPods for our students to use in assignments at home at night. Can you even imagine?