Comments on: Spare me my morons! They are all I have!

By: torgodevil

torgodevil — Wed, 20 Sep 2006 10:21:10 +0000

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.

By: gobfrey

gobfrey — Wed, 20 Sep 2006 08:16:06 +0000

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

By: ZenKimchi

ZenKimchi — Wed, 20 Sep 2006 01:02:09 +0000

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.

By: Eric

Eric — Tue, 19 Sep 2006 15:24:32 +0000

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.