Weekly Blog Posting #7: The Week That Wasn't

Weekly Blog Posting #7: The Week That Wasn’t

“Someone must have ripped the ‘Q’ section out of my dictionary, ‘cause I don’t know the meaning of the word ‘quit’.” – Mr. Furious

            This week was pretty interesting for two reasons; first, I had to combat the growing anticipation (especially on the part of the seniors) for the end of the year; and second, I had to combat my own disorganization when I accidentally misplaced a whole week. That’s right, I lost track of an entire week. Up until the moment I wrote this, I was convinced that there was only one week left of school, that graduation was this coming Saturday. This is apparently not the case. That was perhaps the biggest challenge to overcome.

            On the other hand, Senioritis has become an epidemic more damaging than Bird Flu and Swine Flu put together. It has spread throughout the school in exponential fashion: nearly everyone, including some teachers, now suffer from Senioritis. Getting students to buckle down and work has been a challenge of epic proportions over the course of the last week. I have tried everything in my power from bribes, to group work, to a movie to round out the year. None of it seems to work, my promises of goodies only pacify the class for minutes at a time. At this rate, I might owe each student his or her own weight in candy bars by the time school finally closes out. The thing that really gets me going is that the students aren’t even really that disruptive, most are just totally disengaged. No one turned in any of the homework due on Friday and it is pretty difficult to get the kids to just chill out and do their work. The thing that really baffles me, is that neither myself nor my master teacher have encouraged the idea of summer. It is always reinforced as “not here yet,” or there is a difference between “done and finishing.”

            The teachers have begun to turn off a little bit as well. Some of the teachers seem a lot more irritable and stressed out, probably due to the massive amount of work they have to do to finish out the semester. None of the students cared for the first 2.75 months of the semester what their grades were or what assignments they were missing. But now at the end of the semester, it is a mad scramble for them to try and catch their grades up, even if it is just to be eligible for the summer football work outs or appease their parents when the progress reports come home. In short, I have learned a lot about what the end of the year entails, and the amount of work that all of the sudden becomes necessary for both teachers and students. It also has made me rethink my end of the term strategy, which until now has been “Scramble like Vick in his prime.”