The Arbitrary ChuckJerry

I haven't had too many stories about teaching so far this year. I relayed all of the funny ones I could remember but, unfortunately for the funniness of this blog, I'm becoming a pretty good classroom manager.

Last year I had the opposite problem. Ridiculous, crazy, ludicrous things would happen basically every day in my classroom to the point that they became commonplace and they all ran together and I couldn't pick out one event to relay.

This year I'm happy to say that I have not been the cause of craziness in the classroom. I have one class who I would bet is learning the material better than any other class on the same level in that school. My other classes I don't know that I would make that claim, but they are going fairly smoothly as well.

A funny thing about teaching is that most of the time you love it in retrospect. At the end of the day you realize you're doing a good thing and that is what is motivating. Teaching in New York City is an invitation to slack off and blame the system and if you don't do that, then you should be proud.

This year I'm having an even better experience because I'm motivated to make a difference and all that gay stuff, but I literally look forward to seeing my kids. The one class I mentioned in particular, which happens to be at the beginning of the day, is a joy to teach and I look forward to going.

One of my other classes is made up entirely of students who've failed the same class at least twice before. This class is essentially the exact opposite of my first class. All but 4 or 5 students in that class don't even have a concept of what it means to be a student, period, let alone to be a good student. It is ridiculously frustrating to know that I put in more work for them to pass than they do. I know that I work harder for that class than 95% of them do combined. The few students who take the class seriously all have 90 averages because the material is ridiculously simple, and the rest are simply resigned to fail and don't even envision passing.

I had a conversation with one of the students from this class that basically went like this: Do you find this class hard? No. If you paid attention even a little bit, do you think you'd pass? Yes. But instead, you're failing. Yes. Please explain that to me. I don't know.

This is not a mindset I can even begin to understand. If I'm capable of passing a class with minimal effort, then I do it. In fact, that is how I passed most of my classes when I was in high school. I happen to be more educationally oriented than most of my students (hence the teacher thing), but isn't my passing honors English with a modicum of effort on par to them passing the lowest possible math class with a modicum of effort? Especially since they recognize that they are capable of passing.

I like all the kids in that class and in fact I relate to them, because they are all slightly older than my freshman classes, on a much different level than my other kids. They all respect me and they behave themselves for the most part, but they just don't do anything remotely resembling classwork or homework or anything of the sort.

Some of them are finally starting to turn around, but some of them are getting even worse. Some of them realize that just because I like them as people doesn't mean I'm going to pass them, and since they relate to me on some level, then they do the work. Others just seem content to literally throw their lives away. I can't even begin to think about what must be happening in some of their homes, but at what point do you take responsibility for yourself and say, "If no one else is going to help me, then I'll do it myself"?

Anyway, that class is frustrating a lot of the time, but still fun since the kids are crazy, and the few who listen are really learning, which they haven't done before, so that's something.

My other class is just about average. That is the low level freshman class which also means it's the bilingual math class since there's nowhere else to put them. I have 6 kids who speak only Chinese and who's math is perfect despite the fact that they don't understand me. I have another who speaks mainly Spanish, yet also has one of the highest averages in the class. Then there are the few who speak English fairly well, but also love to group together and speak (and sing) in Bangladeshi or some such language and act like fools. They are not passing. About half the kids in that class are motivated and the other half are not. This class just about resembles an average of all my different experiences teaching so far.

If you read all this, then you like me more than I thought. Thank you for being a friend (and if you threw a party, invited everyone you knew...).