dealing difficult students

What is your reason for not wishing to fail these students?

What do you mean “it works for a week?”
I always try to make it painfully dull not to do any work. I also spend a fair amount of time building the idea that I’m not going to ask them to do anything they can’t do — by breaking things into teeny tiny pieces.

But, when it comes down to it, when I had a kiddo who truly refused to do work, I gave him the grade he had earned. In his case, he was shocked — and started doing the work. He really didn’t think I’d expected him to work.

Do you mean you have emotionally or behaviorally disturbed students? That is a hard class to deal with… :? What we do where I work is we have slashes they earn and lose and when they get 10 at the end of the week they get to get a prize out of the prize box but maybe you can see what external motivation will motivate them to produce. Hopefully, an interview with the parents can help you with this.

Do you mean you have emotionally or behaviorally disturbed students? That is a hard class to deal with… :? What we do where I work is we have slashes they earn and lose and when they get 10 at the end of the week they get to get a prize out of the prize box but maybe you can see what external motivation will motivate them to produce. Hopefully, an interview with the parents can help you with this.

Do you mean you have emotionally or behaviorally disturbed students? That is a hard class to deal with… :? What we do where I work is we have slashes they earn and lose and when they get 10 at the end of the week they get to get a prize out of the prize box but maybe you can see what external motivation will motivate them to produce. Hopefully, an interview with the parents can help you with this.

The first question a doctor would ask you is - when did this begin?

When did they start this? Did it occur in previous years or is it new to this year? That’s a fundamentally important question if you want to solve the problem. Too often we’d rather just make problems go away - who wouldn’t - but rarely do they.

If this has been going on for years, that would be one thing. If it’s just this year, there might be hope for these kids. When you ask them why they refuse to do their work, what’s their answer? That’s also like a doctor asking - where does it hurt?

Would we go to doctors who didn’t ask these questions? Finding out where something hurts and when it began to hurt is crucial to diagnosing and prescribing for the problem. I don’t see working with kids who have school problems to be all that different from doctors working with kids who are ill.

Of course you’ve asked them why they don’t work. To give good advice, someone would have to know the kids’ answers to that question - why don’t you work?

And what do they do instead of work? How many kids in your class? And when we say work what exactly do we mean? Paper work? Worksheets? Reading in class? Reading out of class?

I’m sorry to be of such little help - with more information I might have a suggestion. I like to solve problems not just for my classroom and the time I have the kid but for all the teachers who’ll have the kid after me too I don’t like bandaids - I like to go for the cure.

Good luck with this and I sincerely hope it works out for you and them.

[quote=”Anonymous”]What is your reason for not wishing to fail these students?[/quote]

It’s an interesting question and I’d guess the answer is because she wants to teach them. Even some young teachers these days are old-fashioned enough to think of themselves first as teachers. In the old days, teachers were problem solvers. This young teacher is trying to solve a problem. Good for her.

As Sue points out, sometimes allowing students to fail *is* teaching them.

There are a lot of kids out there who have been propped up for years by good intentions and misguided kindness. When they hit Grade 12 and don’t get a diploma and can’t get any job at all because they are illiterate, they and their families are shocked — for years they have been told that they are progressing well (many parents here have run into this one.)

If the work assigned is *possible* for the students to do and is reasonable for their level, then they do need to learn that sometimes in this life you have to do things you don’t want to and sometimes you have to expend some effort to learn things. It is a real kindness to teach this now and not wait until they are leaving school.

I do note that the work has to be possible — sometimes kids have been hiding illiteracy behind a facade of being difficult for many years, and no amount of threats will make you able to do Grade 8 work if your reading is on a Grade 2 level — this needs to be investigated in some depth before making a snap judgement; and don’t trust those test results, check their real abilities yourself.