My Students

I'm doing my best to come up with practical and emotional strategies that will help me to get through the school year. A little bit of disengagement helps -- once you realize what a situation is and that you're not going to change it, you can concentrate on what you do and not over-invest in caring about the rest. Caring is a positive value, of course, and I am prone to it, but putting your emotional chips down on outcomes you can't control is like playing roulette with your own well-being. The odds in roulette are famously poor.

My students are interesting to observe. They say they like my classes, and I believe them. I work hard to interest them without watering down the material, and I'm not a harsh disciplinarian. But the classes suffer from a kind of collective Attention Deficit Disorder. Even when, say, I show a grabber of a film, 50% of the students will compulsively talk during the entire movie -- they cannot seem to turn off the "socialize" button at any time whatsoever. Although they can engage with the subjects to some extent during class and even make insightful comments, the vast majority will not do outside reading or written assignments or think about the material outside of class.

What makes that refusal more striking is that most of them are not "busy." Not a single one of my 50 students has a legitimate job -- there are almost none to be had hereabouts, and adults occupy most of the teen-type jobs such as fast food. Only a few have cars, and many don't bother to get their licenses (that surprised me), or can't pass the written exam. They are not involved in sports (with the exception of one cheerleader, one equestrienne, and two rodeo boys) or the arts (with the exception of one rock musician, and two fiction writers). Yet they will mostly all tell you straight up that they are far, far too busy to do any homework. A more genuine reason is that many of them have very stressful home lives, which is why we provide them two hours per day in school to get work done in our "Project-Based Learning" room. They use that time to socialize, too, of course.

"It is what it is," as they say. So this student profile is one of the factors I've allowed myself a level of emotional disengagement from. I cannot make Nevada into Massachusetts, and I cannot re-write these students' histories. I have to be content with the fact that what I do doesn't harm them, and probably benefits them slightly. I'll see little glimmers now and then. In movies about teachers those glimmers always turn into a big bonfire, but that's Hollywood, of course.