Dec

30

It’s Not All Up To Me

Filed Under "At-risk" students, The Way I See It 

arrowinheadI’ve been thinking about this for some time now, and I have come to the realization that it’s not all up to me. I don’t know why it took me so long to realize this. Now, it seems perfectly irrational for me to even have entertained the notion that it was all my responsibility for whether students in my credit recovery classes did well or not.
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If you’ve been following my blog, you might know that this semester I teach high school students who have been identified as “at-risk “. These at-risk students are students who are in grades nine and ten and are failing two or more compulsory courses. If these students had passed all their courses, they would have earned sixteen credits ( eight each year) by the end of grade ten. The thinking is that these at risk students are so far behind their peers that they’ll just give up on school and quit as soon as they can- which up to just recently was when they turned sixteen, but now is when they turn eighteen.
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I don’t know why I took all the ownership for these kids recovering their credits. I think part of it was that I am a Student Success Teacher, not a math teacher, an English teacher, a science teacher but a student success teacher. A student success teacher’s job is to have students succeed. If my students don’t succeed, then I don’t succeed- or so I used to think.
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I’d forgotten some things, though. Why? I’m not sure. First, I’d forgotten the danger of getting too attached to something. In this case, getting too attached to being successful helping my students be successful. I wanted my students to succeed. I wanted to succeed at being a student success teacher. I wanted to be able to make help these kids succeed. Do I remember how to I spell EGO? Yes, now I remember how to spell ego. Secondly, I’d forgotten the wisdom in the old adage that “you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink”. I realize that there’s only so much I can do, or more importantly take ownership for. I can provide an environment conducive to learning with the support of parents, administrators, guidance counsellors and other teachers, but I can’t drink the water for my students. They have to do that themselves.

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    These are my personal views and not those of my employer.
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