Apr 25
You are Hulk
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You are a wanderer with amazing strength. 
ARGH! |
Archive for April 25th, 2006
Apr 25
This week is the lovely time of the term known as "test" time, "report card" time, as well as "re-enrollment" time. The feeling that everyone is a little tense before our vacation next week is obvious. My manager has been calling meetings every single day this week talking about the same things he’s been saying the entire month, but now in rapid fire between class sessions. I’ve been told so many impossible things that each meaning has started taking on a sort of comic tone.
Of the students I teach, I only think two are at risk of quitting. If more left, I’d be very surprised. Both students are clearly in the wrong level, have been recommended for a move to a different class multiple times, and have failed every single task given to them in class. One of these at risk students told me he was quitting this week, which I told to my manager. Since I had told him multiple times that this student was in the wrong class for his ability, I can’t really be held responsible for his quitting.
From what I’ve been told from my manager, we are losing a lot more than just two students per teacher. I got called in and asked if I had been assigning homework. I told him I’ve given homework every single day for two months straight. I check homework from my students every single class. I know who is and who isn’t doing homework. It’s the parents responsibility to sign the homework paper every day to say that their child is doing the work. The two students I think will quit are the only students that never do any homework. That’s because they are in the wrong level and can’t do the work I assign. I’ve made it plainly aware to the management in the school that this is the case.
If someone is quitting over a lack of homework in my class because they think I never assign any, it’s the student being tricky. They must be lying to their parents, and forging their parents handwriting to fool me. Unless I call and check each with each parent manually, I can’t know if it was the parent that really signed the homework or not. Anyway, I think I have enough full homework sheets filled out and signed by parents to prove I’ve been giving out enough work to my students.
The solution offered to by my boss was for me to manually write down the homework in every students book. If the parents didn’t see what the child wrote before, how would this matter? As if I don’t have enough to teach each day, I have to sign 12 students books too? Stupid. I write the homework on the board. They copy it. I check to see they wrote it. I check to see it signed the next day. The system works as long as the parents know to look in the book, which would be the manager’s job to tell them.
I’ve got dozens of more report cards to write, tests to make and grade, and I get called into meetings like this when I could be working on something much more important. I’m too busy to hear lame solutions when I’ve got so much to do.
