The Dog Ate My Will To Learn

Let's work backwards today.

I sometimes choose to torture myself by listening to conservative talk radio. Today the host was talking about how some teachers are already packing it up at school. He cited some example of "someone he knew who said his kid said" and hypothesized that these classes were playing checkers all day. Somehow this hypothetical checker playing class became the reason that our test scores are low and how fewer students are ready for college because somewhere in some hypothetical class, kids were spending the last three weeks of school playing checkers.

This brought to mind my 8:30 am existential crisis.

Failure runs rampant in my tiny kingdom. Over half of the group took zeros on a speech (equivalent to a test grade) and group work brings blank stares. It makes me wonder, if we laud the teacher whose class succeeds, what do we do when another group fails? When I give all my effort to see that a student succeeds, am I equally responsible when she climbs out her classroom window to avoid learning? Perhaps I am a bit at fault. I am now doing the jig that many of us do, if you won't try this assignment, let's do something different. Not checkers, a different assignment. This afternoon was spent regrouping and replanning the rest of the semester's work.

My one glimmer of life change came this morning when I corrected a child's use of the word "raper". I think "rapist" is more correct. You ought to use that next time. Perhaps she will use the grammatically correct term next time and perhaps this levels it all out.