Well, I'm making some progress on my grading. I had to take a break after the paper I just read about the Irish Immigration. It was chalk full of interesting information...
"Irishes were too stubborn to eat anything other than potatoes and that's why they all died."
A few alarming thoughts I had after I read this (you can ONLY imagine what the rest of the paper offered)
--This is a junior in high school writing this paper.
--I am this student's English teacher.
--This student thinks EVERY Irish person died.
--This student thinks that the potato famine is a result of the Irish NOT WANTING TO EAT POTATOES..........um.....oh dear.
I'm usually not one to point out my students' shortcomings--I prefer to focus on the positives. BUT, this is pretty bad.
4 comments:
In your student's defense, there were many Irishes who did in fact die....just not ALL of them.
That's tragically funny.
And I have no idea how you're going to avoid your own ambivalence (speaking of Juice's great post) while teaching. It seems like an insufferable labor of, not love, but something akin to perseverance.
You're sure about teaching?
Stacy? Pipe up here.
You'd think by high school things would get better....oh boy. My dad teaches at BYU and it seems like you still have your handful of students like that no matter what age group you teach. I guess you just hope that the rest of your students are picking up more in class! Don't blame it on you, though - they are probably so damaged already that even your superior teaching skills can't save them!!!!!!
Well, I have 150 FRESHMAN all day, so their shortcomings are much different than juniors...however, on the plus side of things, even if I am in the crumiest of moods, one of them is guaranteed to make me laugh. You just have to learn to laugh, and think about all the stupid stuff we said in high school... teaching is rewarding, student teaching does NOT give you the full effect! Give it a year, I promise, it gets better.
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