If I stop to consider what this blog is really about I think it is about forming relationships with students. I find this a really interesting concept. At college we read a myriad of things that told us HOW to form lasting and meaningful learning relationships with our students (didn't we?!?!). Whether I read it somewhere, or just formed a misguided opinion, I came to this job thinking that forming relationships was just a series of steps that I needed to undertake in order to complete this seemingly simple task. One that I also arrogantly assumed I would be awesome at!
How wrong was I?
First of all...teenagers are busy, fickle, obsessed, passionate creatures. It is highly likely that you will be loved one day and hated the next. I can honestly say that many times over the last two terms I have done the broken the golden rule and taken those moods personally. One particularly memorable moment was when I had more than one student in a junior class act in a disrespectful and defiant manner and when I exercised every ounce of classroom management that I thought I had they just explained to me that the reason they weren't doing the work was because "No offence Miss, but its so boring" and then the real killer "Everybody thinks so". This morning I was reading some of the early pages of Gretchen Rubin's "The Happiness Project" - where she astutely outlines her "Secrets of Adulthood" as "the lessons [she'd] learnt with some difficulty as [she'd] grown up. One of which, she reveals is, "Never start a sentence with the words 'no offence'. Oh how I wish my little juniors could take the fast track with that particular lesson. (Of course I did take offence and spent the first ten minutes of the senior class that followed trying to stop the flow of tears in my office)
What have I learnt from this - well, one thing is that the maturity of the student does influence their ability to behave. I have been struggling to come to terms with the fact that the juniors of the school are the worst behaved but perhaps this is because they might missed the memo on how to be respectful, hopefully through a lack of defiance and an attempt at the task given, a concept that we expect these fearful juniors to arrive at college with. If they have missed this, as a result of poor upbringing, or lack of interest in them, then we might need to wait until they get to the maturity of realizing that their decisions and actions, ultimately affect themselves (this is also a hopeful outcome, as many, sadly, might not get there). What happened to my little juniors who explained to me that the work was boring? By the end of the second term they had both being removed from all of their classes for repeat offending.
I did not make lasting relationships with these students. Perhaps I will have another opportunity in the future. However, the main intention of this post was to celebrate the lasting relationships that I have made. I am considering as I prepare to go back to the third term, what relationships are the strongest. These relationships are this way because of certain approaches:
- being consistent (something that I am not particularly good at, but moments of consistency do yield lasting results)
- learning to laugh at myself (something that students get a huge kick out of)
- having a high expectation of their work output, or more simply, expressing faith in them
- and - taking an interest in them as individuals
I feel it is well past the time that I should sign off. My head is swarming with other anecdotes that I could add here, so I feel that this topic might have another post in the future. However I sign off now as I started. When I was on placement last year, one of the teachers I was assigned to always finished her week with "make safe choices" - this stuck with me and I found myself incorporating it into my own classroom sign-off. To keep it light I would always add to it "Make safe choices and eat your vegetables". I was convinced that everyone thought I was a little nutty until one day when I was distracted, hadn't finished the lesson with any sort of grace and kids were sprinting out the door to their next class one instructed me to "have a safe weekend Miss, eat your vegetables" - and at that point I realised that I was making a little impact :-)
No comments:
Post a Comment