A few months back, I had a student drop out of my class. He never, ever did homework, couldn’t memorize anything, hardly spoke in class, had terrible behavior, and was generally a waste of a chair. I wasn’t sad to see him go.
Now, after the classes realigned and we started a new semester, he rejoined the school. He started back at the same level he was when he left, and is doing as poorly as he ever did. He’s in a class of low level learners. These students don’t talk, so when we did a dictation exercise, none of them could memorize it after we repeated it many times. No one even tried. They had to write the dictation instead.
They are as bad at writing as they are speaking and listening. Any time dictation needs to be written, it takes tons of time, because the student’s don’t listen, and they can’t spell very well either. Some of the students in the class still don’t know their “b” from their “d” after a solid year of teaching. This means I have to repeat, line by line, and help them spell.
The best girl in the class was sitting to the returning boy, who is already busting a new hole in what used to be the bottom of this low level class. The smart girl had tried to memorize the dictation when their book was open, that was she could write it for the inevitable notebook exercise. She got through five of the six lines without major mistakes, but she forgot one of the lines in the book when she tried to write it from memory into the notebook. Since she had “gone ahead” of where the dictation was on the tape, she had written five lines while everyone else was still struggling with the first.
She yelled, “I’m finished.”
The bad boy next to her yelled, “I’m finished too!” at the exact same time.
I went over to check the girl’s paper first, simply because I thought the boy had meant he was finished with the first line, not the whole paper. That would have been more on par with his usual speed of work. When I looked at the girls paper, I corrected some of her mistakes and then moved on to the boy’s paper. He had the exact same lines written, with the exact same spelling mistakes as the girl next to him.
Since I had been giving out spelling advice, if he had been listening to me and working on his own as he had claimed, he wouldn’t have written the first few lines with those mistakes. Only that girl had made those same mistakes.
“You wrote this?” I asked. I had seen him peeking over at the girl’s paper, but I didn’t know if she was helping spell a word, or what. He replied that he did write everything on his own.
“Then why do you have all the same mistakes as her!?” He refused to admit he had cheated.
As we were talking, there was a police car siren wail directly outside our building. I pointed to the camera mounted on the ceiling. “Run! You better run now! They are coming to get you! Didn’t you hear them? It’s the police! They know you cheated! They saw it on the camera and now they are coming to get you!”
The boy turned a shade of green, as if he was so scared he was going to be sick. The rest of the class laughed. I’m not sure how long he will last in class now that he’s returned, but I won’t miss him either way. I wish there would have been a police officer in the school when class let out to really scare him when he left. That might have scared him straight.
