Here's a little background before the story gets going. My class of M2/3 students drive me crazy. BY FAR, they are the most difficult class I teach every week. They are hard to focus, there is constant chatter, and a wide range of English ability... some students understand the material too easily and others cannot understand a single word that comes out of my mouth. To make matters worse, ALL the girls sit in front and ALL the boys sit in back. The naughty ones sit in the middle (its like their mocking you by talking when you are standing closest to them) and the quiet ones sit on the side. In particular, I am having problems with the girls. On Tuesday, I had 4 girls show up 30 minutes late to my 50 minute class. They said that a Thai teacher sent one of them to get different socks, and so on and so forth and that was why they were late. Either way, I let them in and told them not to be late again. The next day, I took a cell phone away from one of the same girls for the entire day because she was texting after I had already made her stand up for talking. Its a bit of a nightmare, but all the teachers are having problems with this class.
Today, when I was doing my period check, lo and behold I saw the same 4 girls who had been late on Tuesday skipping their 5th period class. I was so mad! Not because they were being disobedient, but because at 13 they should be learning and not be wasting their good brains by blowing off class. SO I brought them to their classroom, the teacher reprimanded them and sent 3 to the English Program office with myself as their escort. The girls started crying when they learned they would be speaking with the director. This was all discussed in Thai so I just stood and watched. Later, I learned that these girls have been a bit of a problem since last year and every teacher I spoke with about the situation just put them in the category of "bad kids." They said that if they're skipping class, at least they're not disrupting it. For me, this is so discouraging! Maybe these girls have never had someone who actually tried to show them something different. Maybe if they were not believed to be so bad they would act better. On the other hand, maybe they are a lost cause. But I feel like I should do something different with them. Its a hard lesson to teach, but eventually these girls need to realize that being smart and trying hard counts for so much more than they give it credit for. Its frustrating. The school really doesn't do much as far as these things are concerned and they let students get away with so much because the government won't fail them. I'll have another entry later on this I'm sure, but today was just one of those days when I realized there's too much work to do and the system is SO far from perfect. This job might just be the end of me.
Oh, come on teacher
ReplyDeletethey're just bad students