My students talk to me in class. No matter what they think of me as a teacher, no matter how much they hate reading and writing and taking tests, I think they know that I’m not too full of crap. So they talk to me. Sometimes they put it in writing. Most times, I wish they wouldn’t talk, because even though I’ve tried to stay out of the loop this year and just go about my business with my students, I hear too many things that are just embarrassing.
And, with that written, I don’t feel like divulging what they tell me. If I told you that students were disappointed because they are on their whatever number teacher, would that be surprising? Because you should have cared after the second teacher, or the third, and so on. Sadly, I doubt this happening fits into our school’s definition of transparency, so the cone of silence has been activated.
Some of my students got moved around today. One kid was happy to get out of a certain teacher’s class; the other was mad that he got put into that same class the other got out of. The student that got moved into the class had no idea why the move happened. I have a guess–after the one student left, they moved someone in. This is not Thunderdome where two men enter and one man leaves. This is filling holes.
I could go on forever, but it’s Thursday, my favorite, and I don’t like being reminded of why I feel embarrassed. Instead, I will feel empathetic to the teachers, plural, that tell me they wake up all night, don’t sleep well anymore, are on edge even at home, and don’t know what to do because they don’t think anyone cares.
Tomorrow is Friday and I like most of my students, past and present. We’ll build on that for now.