Spare me my morons! They are all I have!
Teaching September 19th. 2006, 10:01pmToday in one of the levels of classes that is for students have never really gotten good enough to be pushed up the the next level with confidence, I nearly had a mental breakdown trying to explain an extremely simple test. I had been well prepared for the fact that if I didn’t give them all of the information required to finish the test, they wouldn’t be able to do it. While I can confidently give spelling tests to students much younger in all my other classes, these students are "special", in that they can’t do much on their own.
I created, what I thought, would be an elegant solution to the problem. I wanted to test the student’s ability to recall the synonyms and antonyms of words we’ve been studying together for three weeks. I told them to prepare to be able to name words by recognizing their definitions, or words with similar meanings. I modeled the test after an activity in the book. I gave them a list of words or definitions, then placed all the possible answers in a word bank at the top of the page. All any student needed to do was look above, copy the proper word next to the correct synonym or antonym. I even told them what to do in Korean as I handed out the test, the best I could.
Immediately students threw up their hands and said, "I don’t know the first answer. I don’t know how to do this. I’m not going to do this at all." If there is anything that angers me off more as a teacher, it’s the unwillingness to try even the slightest bit. These are, of course, the worst of the worst students for this particular level that react with such impatience. I went around individually with every single student that had difficulty and explained it to them until they understood. One particularly dense student took for explanations from me, his neighbors, and everyone in class, and he still didn’t know what he was doing.
Meanwhile, the students that tried managed to get about 70% of the same test completed before they ran out of time. They still failed, and I gave them many, many hints to get them there, but at least they showed me it wasn’t the test’s design that made their results. It was the fact that none of the students had studied.
I warned there would be a retest tomorrow, and it would be a "don’t go home from school if you fail the test" sort of retesting. All the bad students whined about needing to leave as quickly as possible, either because of other schools or due to the bus. I told them they better not fail if that is the case, so come to class prepared to do well. The marginally better students corrected their tests with the time they had left after I returned it to them, and I made sure everyone left with the correct answers for the test tomorrow.
I was pretty upset, so when I returned to the teacher’s room, I mentioned the situation to my director. She started questioning me about the reactions of different students in the testing situation. Who did well? Who did poorly? Who tried? Who didn’t? After I was finish naming names, she prepared a list. She suggested to the head teacher that she moved the higher level students to another class, and leave that class for all the students that couldn’t do anything from day to day. Instead of having students that almost pass a test, I’m going to be left with students that would rather stick a pencil up their nose than study. If that class gets subdivided and my "almost tolerable" students get split off, I might go crazy on a student before the end of the year. I think this is something they should consider in a class I see three times a week.
4 Responses to “Spare me my morons! They are all I have!”
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September 20th, 2006 at 12:24 am
It sounds like those kids have a bad case of teacher dependence. I used to do the same thing in elementary school during math tests. I would ask the teacher for help instead of trying, attempting to trick her into answering problems for me. It worked some of the time, so I kept doing it. When I eventually got a teacher that didn’t fall for that trick, I was SOL and had to start studying more. Part of that was I wanted to do well because A) I’m a people pleaser by nature, and B) my parents were on me like white on rice to try my best in school.
My suggestion, if you care, is to ween them off your assistance. This is accomplished most often through the “scaffolding” method. You build a set of support structures (repeating directions, individual attention to students with problems, etc.) and slowly remove these supports. This all has to be explained to them so they know what you are going to do. For instance, you say you will only explain the directions for the test once. When they ask for you to repeat it, you refuse. Obviously a balance will need to be found so they’re not completely frustrated. But continuing to cater to their every complaint will only encourage that behavior because it produces the results they desire.
September 20th, 2006 at 10:02 am
I get this all the time, and it drives me crazy.
I recently gave a simple grammar test that required the students to basically copy the sentences already on the paper. It had questions such as “What do you do in the morning?”
A box at the top of the paper had phrases like “get up”, “take a shower”, and “eat breakfast.”
All they had to do was copy part of the question and one of the phrases in the box.
“I get up in the morning.”
I told them how to do this before handing out the quiz. During the test, I even reminded them to write in complete sentences by saying, “I want your answers to be, ‘I eat lunch at noon.’ Understand?”
Half of one of my classes failed it. Some wrote answers like, “get up.”
Others were surreal, like, “I get up ate in the morning. I go to school ate in the morning.”
Or…
“I get up and take a shower and eat breakfast and go to school and see my friends and do my homework.”
The truly excrutiating exercise of the week is the weekly diaries. I have to weekly remind them not to write diaries such as the following:
I like Maple Story. It is funny. I like Maple Story because it is funny. My family Seoul. I eat dinner. It’s delicious. It’s good. Yesterday is funny.
These are supposedly level 4 kids. They can write past tense. They know the basic SVO sentence structure. And they are reminded each week that I am not interested in updates on their levels in Maple Story.
September 20th, 2006 at 5:16 pm
Dude!
Sounds like you’re getting a little bitter. Don’t take it personally, I’m sure they’re like that with every teacher.
–
Adam
September 20th, 2006 at 7:21 pm
As a follow up, two of the students that did the worst in class couldn’t improve their performance. They failed the same test given on a second day. That’s pretty bad. Almost everyone else improved. One girl actually went from nearly passing to completely failing. She claimed it was because she forgot the words, but the actual reason was that she didn’t have time to copy of the girl that sits next to her.