One of my students made me laugh because he missed school for about a month and then showed up one day, not expecting to get back on track, not expecting to learn anything, but really just looking to bide time until he can miss school for another month. I don't understand why he doesn't just drop out.
Obviously, that was overly cynical. My homeroom has me in stitches right now: they are jealous that my regular classes can earn tickets, but they cannot. Because of them, I've made my ticket policy non-discriminatory, and you would laugh to see my formerly...let's call them "Dionysian" (have to keep the classics alive)... homeroom jump over itself to sit down first, erase the board, fill out the attendance sheet, and stack up books in nice piles. And they stopped talking graphically about sex, too!
I will roll the past two weeks into one big success story:
There exists a program "Future Educators of America," or FEA for short. The FEA is a sort of fraternal, tuition-aiding program that veers high school seniors towards educational careers. Seniors at Simmons High have been applying for the past two weeks and many have approached me to complete one of three required teacher recommendation forms. This, in itself, I count as a success because I choose to read their actions as saying that they either respect me or, at least, no longer think of me as some weird person they'd rather not associate with at all.
After the application process, somewhere along the lines of 20 seniors were accepted into the program. They were told upon their acceptance that they needed to find a "mentor" teacher to help show them the ropes. Now, I will grant that four of these seniors interrupted my sixth period freshmen class--so i've not trained them as well as i'd like--but the four did interrupt to ask me to be their mentor. I was their first choice. I could take no more than two, and I feel a little guilty about being a first year teacher pretending to be able to instill some sort of wisdom into these kids, but this above everything else seems to show that they respect what I'm doing and--if they've decided to pick me to mentor them--I must be somewhat effective at getting my message across in class.
