understanding

I just yelled at a class. I don’t think I’ve ever really done that before. It’s really down to the last little bit of school here and I’d love it if it was just over. I’m so frustrated that still, after more than 150 days of coming to my class where the very first thing is always silent writing in response to a launch questions, students have to be asked repeatedly to stop conversations and get out paper and get out a pencil. It really makes me think so poorly of them when I have to repeat a simple instruction directly to multiple students because they’re just sitting there. I know they heard me and I know they understood. They just don’t care enough to unzip that backpack.

I’m not a boring or awful teacher; none of my students call me a racist or say that they hate me or steal the markers from my whiteboard. (Those things commonly happen in other classrooms.) But they just don’t know what to do here at school. They have no idea how to act or get an education. And, unfortunately, I haven’t fixed that problem this year. It’s pretty discouraging to see a group of teenagers so completely ill-equipped to learn in an academic context and so completely lacking in skills and motivation. At times like this I start to think about their futures. I look out my second-floor window into the street of the ghetto and hope they find some other way out of here, because success in school is not going to be their ticket.