Perhaps the Lowest Point...

It's funny...well, it really isn't something to laugh about...but the very day after my last post, Ms. G., the Filipino teacher on my technology team, had such a difficult morning with the kids that she had to leave early to compose herself. Like I said, before, it is difficult for me to see this because of how much I want the program to work.

Today, I decided to jump in and and try to help out with some of her classes. She was heading to the computer lab to do a web quest, so I used it as an opportunity get involved. It was a tiring day. I think part of the problem was that the students were given work that was beyond their abilities, but beyond that, many of the students' behaviors were out of control.

The final class of the day was the worst, I ended up just holding about ten of the kids upstairs in Ms. G's room while she took the rest to the lab. Honestly, I tried every trick up my sleeve to hook these kids, who were among the most difficult in the school, to no avail. Finally, when the grade level administrator decided to sit in the back of the room, I was able to make a little headway at breaking down the information and teaching them a little something.

These past days have been trying. I have seen some difficult situations in my last four years at Lemmel, but I have never been so pessimistic as I am tonight. Teaching in Baltimore is often times like trying to force a baby to eat food that it doesn't want--you try every trick in the book to get them to open their mouth and eat. But the fact is that many of our students just don't want to learn. But we live in America, where everything is fair, and fair means that the teachers in these schools are held accountable for teaching these students, whether the students want it or not. So, in these situations teachers don't really teach much, they spend their time poking and proding children into doing soemthing...the students have the power, they choose whether to comply or not. Many do, but it only takes two or three in a class who don't to significanly decrease the ammount of information conveyed on a give day.

I am surrounded by bright, dedicated individuals who are driving themselves insane because they want to succeed so badly in a situation that is hopeless. Yes, that it how it seemed to me today: hopeless.

So today I looked at the situation a little differently and asked myself, what is it exactly that separates these poor children from the children that Ms. G used to teach Physics and Algebra to in the Filipenes, or the Children that Dr. N. used to teach back in Nigeria. And, in spite of all of the books on teaching African-American children, and in spite of all of the journal articles about teaching children in poverty, I think maybe it might all come down to one thing: these children already have everything they need (except maybe a mom or a dad). They have food, they have nice clothes, they and their familie seem to be content with they way things are. So, why do urban teachers have to FORCE them to learn? Why must we play this losing game?

I have never seen children go to such lengths to get out of doing a simple task. I have seen children exert so much energy, find every loophole, every discraction, to get out of answering a question or reading a sentence or just thinking about something new..........