All sparkles may not go on to shine...

There are many thoughts just sitting in my head that I have never found the right words to verbalize. They only take on life in the spoken world when some very intelligent person expresses a thought of their own that in some way parallels mine, and in doing so, provides me with the language I was lacking. If you couldn't guess, that happened to me this week. Thanks to my supervisor, I can now express to those of you who read this blog one of my greatest concerns when it comes to education...

This entry focuses on students who lose their sparkle.

What is a student's sparkle? Many of you can probably guess. It is that enthusiasm to learn, that natural curiosity, that eagerness to explore and discover which every child possesses at birth. However, somewhere along the line, many sparkles lose their refractive power. They fade into dull gray dots of apathy.

I have many dull gray dots amongst the juniors that I teach. The way they drag their feet into class, slump down in their chairs, and immediately put their heads down causes me to wonder, when did they loose it? When did they lose their sparkle?

Did it happen in a moment? The first time a teacher shot down a question? The first time someone said they were stupid? The first time they got called a trouble maker? The first time they were compared to a "more intelligent" child?

Or did it happen gradually? Was it simply the accumulation of multiple academic and life frustrations that after 17 years just forced their bright and beautiful sparkle into a dull submission? Either way, my apathetic students are my greatest frustration and my deepest heartbreak.

Which leads me to the question that has driven my academic pursuits since I became interested in education...

Can you re-spark a sparkle?

Can you undo 13+ years of academic discouragement? Can you fight unfortunate life circumstances and devastating events that have nothing to do with school, but that do gut wrenching damage to children?

This post has a lot of questions and not many answers. Personally, I would like to think you can re-ignite something in the mind of an apathetic student. Especially if you are willing dedicate yourself to doing so. With time and patience, sometimes you can get the blood flowing through a student's scholarly vein again. The question is, how? Showing students you believe in their abilities is great. Setting high standards for all of your pupils is admirable. Going the extra mile to ensure they understand the concepts you are teaching by staying after school, catering to their individual learning needs, and getting to know them personally is extraordinary.

But what about the ones that are so far gone that even all of that is not enough? Do you just let all lingering hints of a glimmer die? How do we as teachers reach the students who lost their sparkle so long ago, they have forgotten what it feels like to care?

Please let me know what you think. I am really interested in other people's insights and experiences with this particular challenge.

A Bronte Tutorial in Attitudes Toward Behavior

I find that when I am struggling with an issue, inspiration comes from most surprising places.

My most recent befuddlement rises from the complete disregard that many of my students, especially in my third block class, show for basically everything we do. Some (not all) of them possess the unique skill of being able to maintain a steady stream of dialogue, that has nothing to do with 20th Century Global Studies, for the entire 80 minutes we are together. All efforts on my part to refocus them have been successful for 15 minute spurts, but nothing I have tried so far has had any lasting hold on the behavior in my classroom. By the end of class Friday, I was feeling very frustrated and a bit personally injured by their apparent lack of respect for me and the other students in the class.

Before going to bed Friday night, I took some time to continue my literary journey through Charlotte Bronte's master work Jane Eyre. So far, I am very impressed with Miss Bronte's writing style and character development. I am especially impressed with Helen Burns, a school friend of Jane's, who provides many deep insights into human nature. At one point in the story, Helen gives her thoughts on the darker side of human behavior,

"...with this creed, I can so clearly distinguish between the criminal and his crime, I can so sincerely forgive the first while I abhor the last; with this creed, revenge never worries my heart, degradation never too deeply disgusts me, injustice never crushes me too low..."

So lofty words for so young a person, and the point they drive home is so important. Especially for my current situation. This concept of admonishing the behavior instead of the individual, of maintaining disdain for the act, but forgiving the person who committed it is one that I am constantly forgetting and rediscovering.

My students do not exist only for the 80 minutes that I teach them. On some level I realize that, but on days like Friday, it is the first thing I overlook. So much more is going on in their lives than I can possibly see from my position of authority at the front of the room. While my mind is on how to convey the connections between Imperialism, Industrialism, and World War One, while I am up nights obsessing over how to make the world of 1914 Europe come alive in my classroom, my students are dealing with a million other issues that range from, "Does he/she like me, cause I definitely like him/her." to "I think I might be pregnant."

Therefore, by laying aside my perspective of my students as disrespectful people (which they are not) and instead viewing their behavior as disrespectful (which it is), I might be able to get further. Perhaps by treating them like respectable and mature adults, I can gain more cooperation. It may be time to have a discussion with the class about proper classroom behavior and reasonable classroom expectations and why they are important. This conversation should have happened earlier, but better late than never.

Talking to my students about my expectations may very well have absolutely no effect on anything. In which case, I will have to be a bit more firm. However, I would like to give my them the benefit of the doubt and at least afford them the chance to be the kind of students I know they are capable of being.

I think I will probably write Bronte's excellent insight on some scrap of paper and add it to my wall of inspiration. No matter how wronged I may feel, no matter how disgusting or disrespectful an act committed against me may seem, I feel it is essential to my life philosophy that I am able to divorce that behavior from not only my students, but all the people that hold essential places in my life. That is most definitely more difficult to do than it is to say. Generally speaking though, I function much better when I am able to remember that there is more to people than their ugliest parts.

We all have within us the capability to be both extraordinarily inspiring with our acts of selflessness and bravery and destructively harmful with our acts of selfishness and cowardice. It is easy to see all the ways in which we can be the latter, but sometimes it takes someone else's undying belief in our ability to be the former to help us realize that we are also capable of making a positive difference in this world.