One of my colleagues had a conversation yesterday with a boy who is failing his class. He tried to meet with the kid to discuss the grade a couple of times, but the kid never showed up. Finally he cornered the boy after school last week and sat him down.
Teacher: You’re failing my class.
Student: I know, but I don’t know what to do about it.
Teacher: Well, you’re getting 2 or 3 out of ten on every reading quiz, so I think the problem is that you’re not doing the reading.
Student: You’re just assigning too much work. I don’t know how you expect us to get it all done. I have a busy schedule, and there just isn’t time.
Teacher: Okay, take me through your day. What things do you have to do.
Student: Well I’m here at school for six hours a day. Then I have practice. Then there’s a forty minute drive home. Then it’s dinner time.
Teacher: And then?
Student: Then it’s 6:30.
Teacher: Okay, so you do have time when you could be doing the reading.
Student: No, I just told you I’m busy all day.
Teacher: What about after dinner?
Student: I told you, I’m busy. That’s when I watch TV.
It’s really hard to imagine a student saying that. I would think once you’re in high school, you have enough thinking ability to realize that television is not a valid excuse for not doing homework.
I can’t understand how some people don’t think school matters.
What frightens me about this is recognizing my own tendencies buried in it. It’s so easy to get caught up in all the books and articles I want to read and movies I want to see and believe the lie that “I don’t have time for it.”
It is pretty amazing that the student treated tv time as a requirement like practice and dinner with the family. One almost imagines him trying to sneak off to do homework and his parents yelling at him and telling him to sit back down and watch The Office like he’s supposed to.