A few years ago, a teacher I knew had the words, “To Hell With You If You Waste My Time,” posted on her bookshelf. I was shocked the first time I saw it, but I didn’t have the courage to ask her about it. She seemed like a nice person. Why, would she wish hell on another person who wasted her time? It didn’t make sense to me. That teacher has moved on from the school, so I can’t ask her but I’m guessing that she carries some deep seeded insecurity. In today’s performance based culture, those who perform well are accepted those who don’t are rejected. Let’s call her Fran. It’s not her real name. Fran was an excellent teacher many of her students did well on their exams and even on the DSE. Fran had dedicated much of her life to teaching and she was good at it. I’m sure she was deeply hurt by those students who didn’t take her classes seriously. Fran was a rather black and white person. I don’t think she had a lot of room for shades of gray especially in this area. When students came to her class, she expected them to learn and when they didn’t she wrote them off as a waste of her time.
Teachers Struggle
It’s not just Fran who comes across students who don’t want to learn. As long as education remains mandatory, all teachers will at some point come across these kinds of students. How we respond to them says more about us than it does about them. Can we handle their rejection of our teaching? I think sometimes we are tempted to take it personally. They don’t like us. Of course, we are not there for them to like us. We are to teach them. We need to be the bigger person in the relationship. We need to choose to love them in-spite of what may at times seem like overwhelming differences. Get Healthy and Then Care For Others. It’s our responsibility accurately access them and provide an environment in which they can grow. If we only focus on their short comings, we will likely expand the divide between us and them.
Letting Go
Last week I was accessing some S1 students. They were failing. Why continue I thought, so I stopped the class a few minutes early to remind all the students that they could find the materials we were covering on Google Classroom. I told them to write down the “join code” for Google Classroom. Most of them still haven’t joined my Google Classroom. My heart sank as I looked out at the class. Only one boy was writing down the code, but he was writing it in the folder that I was about to collect. I told him and the others to write it on a separate sheet of paper. They had absolutely no interest in doing what I was saying. The bell was about to ring. In that moment, I felt like the students were wasting both their time and mine. It felt very hallow. I could not force them to do what I wanted them to do. They were making their own choice not to and I just had to let go.
It’s not easy to be a teacher. Students will undoubtedly test our patience. We should not be like Fran who needed to write them off as deserving hell for wasting her time. Maybe they will do better next time. We can’t know. All we can do is do our best to help them. We are sowing seeds. Some of those seeds will bear fruit but many of them will not and that’s okay. If we anchor our value in our students success or lack there of, we will constantly be feeling up and down. It’s just not wise.
