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Feb
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Give me your discouraged, your reluctant students
Filed Under "At-risk" students, Special Education, The way I see it
Statue courtesy of http://www.mapmsg.comIts the end of the first week of the semester, and I’m staring to feel like the Statue of Liberty again.
For the last couple of days, “at-risk” students have been coming and asking me if they can transfer into my Advanced Learning Strategies Class- please, please Miss. For the last couple of days, guidance counselors have been asking me if they can transfer some “at-risk” students out of other classes, into my class. (It’s so nice of the guidance counselors to ask because really, they could just do it. My classes aren’t maxed out yet, but pretty close.)
I’ve been choosing to teach “at-risk” students for a long time now and feel by choosing to teach these students, I’m really saying
Give me your discouraged
Your reluctant students, yearning to leave school
Send these, the at-risk to me
I lift my lamp beside the classroom doorRelated Posts
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3 Responses to “Give me your discouraged, your reluctant students”
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Elona, how do you do it with such a great attitude. I feel like I’m running out of gas after only a couple of years. I need a fresh load of inspiration.
Leila,
It was extremely hard at the beginning, and it isn’t so easy now sometimes even after 25 years, but I’ve learned to keep asking myself what is it I love about teaching and make sure I do lots of that-sometimes that’s in the classroom, sometimes it’s out of the classroom.
I’ve found out what I like by finding out what I don’t like. Recently I found that I liked the idea of teaching a certain program more than I liked doing it. I had a very unhappy semester not too long ago because my teaching assignment was not a good fit for me even though I thought it would be and volunteered to do it. That was a lesson, I’ll tell you.
I’ve also learned to use my strengths in the classroom to help keep me happy. I’m really good at certain things and not so great at others so I focus on my strengths and just live with my weaknesses. I’m not perfect. My students are OK with that. In fact, I think that’s why I’m able to develop such good rapport with them because I let them see the human side of me, the side that’s not perfect but the side of me that wants to help my students be the best they can be. That best they can be or want to be may not be headed to university or college and that’s OK. I respect that. I’ll help them be successful whatever path they want to take.
I’ve also learned to avoid negative people. Those negative vibes just dragged me down, down, down and everything looked bad. Now, I search out people with positive attitudes and talk to them. That’s not to say that we don’t complain about things but we do that for a moment and then move on to more positive things. That’s not to say we don’t try to change things if they really need changing. We do.
I wonder what strategies other teachers use to help them continue to enjoy,if not love, teaching.
I’d really appreciate hearing about them. Please take a minute and tell us about them.
Thanks.
Thank you for your response and for being so honest. One of the things I use is my sense of humor. I have a marvelous, offbeat sense of humor that my students love. It helps get me through the day. I also love to read. Thankfully, this is something my students are picking up.