This is the sign that I posted in my classroom just a few weeks ago. My students pretty much live their lives by the complete opposite of what this sign intends to do. All too often, when they don't get their way in terms of the grade they received on a particular assignment, or for my baseball players, the fact that they aren't receiving as much playing time as they would like, they immediately make excuses and point the finger at anyone but themselves. Moreover, probably because I work in an affluent district, many of my students and baseball players have never really had to work for very much in their lives. Because they have money, their parents have always taken care of things and handed them everything that they've ever gotten.
For these reasons, I spent about the first ten minutes of class the other day going over the meaning of this sign that I posted in the front of my classroom, as well as the reasons as to why I posted it. These kids need to come to an understanding that they themselves need to stop blaming other people for their problems, and that they need to start to take responsibility for their own actions. Furthermore, they also need to stop expecting people to spoon feed them and hand them everything that they have in their lives. Most importantly though, the work ethic that these kids has is pathetic. Nobody wants to work hard for anything anymore, they just expect things to get taken care of for them or be handed to them. For this reason, they need to stop expecting things like this to happen for them, and need to start helping themselves by actually doing something to help themselves.
I have had the privilege of working with a veteran math teacher of 37 years who recently announced that he is going to retire at the end of this school year. Keeping in mind the sign in my classroom, I was interested to see what his take was on things so I asked him what the biggest difference was between the kids who are currently in his class now as opposed to the kids he had in his class during his very first year of teaching. His response, "every single one of them was a good student back then". I knew immediately what he meant by that, and it was not that they were necessarily smarter than the kids of today, but that back then, all of his students, bright or not, worked hard so that they were good students. Kids these days don't have that type of desire and competitive spirit in them, and it only makes me worry about what the future has to offer for many of these spoiled and lazy kids.
2 comments:
I can absolutely understand what you are going through with your students. I often say to my friends that when I was in school and got into trouble my parents would ask, "What did you do to upset the teacher?" Now, the parents ask the kids, "What did the teacher do to make you upset?" Kids are being spoonfed, they don't take responsibility, and they don't know how to deal with disappointment. This is, of course, a generalization, but I see it all the time in an elementary classroom. I sympathize with your frustrations.
It is so interesting that you bring up the point about students being spoon fed. I am taking the course Action Research and in one of my interviews, the math teacher discussed how he feels that the students are used to being "spoon fed" the answers to problems. He made a great analogy, "If you leave a trail of cheese for mice to follow they will follow it with no problems and make it through the maze. But if you take away that trail of cheese, would they follow the right path?" Another saying that I always bring with me to work is "you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink." Unfortunately, learning is in the students' hands. We can hep them along the way and try to make them learn but if they are not willing it will not happen. All we can do as teachers is to provide a safe, nurturing, and stimulating environment, give them the proper tools, and model the behavior we are expecting to see. The rest is in their hands, and quite frankly it is scary!
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