Hello friends, family, and strangers (I flatter myself)! I am a recently-graduated girl finding my way in the "real world" (apparently, I've been floating around the fake world for the past two decades). Many of my friends' "real world"s consist of cubicles, nine-to-fives, marriage, babies, and other such grown-up things. My real world looks a little different. Yes, I still get up and go to work every morning, same as they do. But instead of battling fax machines, computer programs, disgruntled spouses and dirty diapers, I arm myself against a legion of 14-year-old boys. Well, 83 of them to be exact. You see, I teach 8th-grade boys' Science in an inner-city, high-poverty school. What it is not: glamorous, prestigious, boring. What it is: humorous, heartbreaking, and the most challenging thing I will ever do.

The stories I tell and the people I describe are real; you can't make this stuff up. If you are new to my blog, I hope you'll start at the beginning and fall in love with its characters, just as I have.

Sunday, September 26, 2010

OD'd. As in overwhelmed and discouraged.

While I'm up in the front of the classroom, it's easy to forget that my students are years behind where they should be in school. As I give my lesson that I understand perfectly and think that I'm explaining so well, I always overestimate what they're digesting.

It's only when I'm grading papers that I get overwhelmingly discouraged. With scores averaging in the low 60s for a simple vocabulary quiz, I don't even know where to begin in my efforts to "fix" this problem. "This problem" being an achievement gap that's much bigger than me or my classroom or even the 90 boys that I teach. How do you reverse 14 years of poor education and bad habits and cultural norms in the short span that you're with them?

I certainly don't know. And unfortunately, taking this job has made me more cynical than hopeful. The only people that are more jaded than teachers are the students themselves.

An example of the answer I received in response to the prompt "In a few sentences, describe a convection current. Use the word density."

When me and Larry ir move away form the house we are convection together and some time we get density from the Sun.

Whaaaat? You tell me what to do with that.
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1 comment:

  1. Lindsey SmithSeptember 28, 2010 at 10:42 AM

    maybe they were confused? dyslexic?

    remember how long it took you to learn what getting "boomed" meant...

    here is my sentence... and it will show my lack of knowledge.

    we used a convection oven to make something delicious, the water we used had great density.

    hahaha

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