A thing I wrote because I'm a teacher and this week I am Sick Of It:
The hand goes up. No one is listening to my instructions, and I’m already prepared to field an endless bout of questions regarding the directions written on the paper in front of them, the same directions I’m verbalizing with additional clarity. Only when I’m finished speaking will they pay attention, perk up and out of a blank, dead-eyed daze to ask:
“Wait, what’re we doing?”
A hand raised in the middle of my explanation means an interruption, and I feel the wheels on the train of thought disengage from the track. I’m easily distracted, and constantly waylaid by requests for the bathroom that have me floundering to refocus. I have yet to have a student ask what we’re doing in the middle of my explanations, so it must be the bathroom. They can wait. I’m almost done.
I conclude, telling them to “go forth” and complete an assignment that couldn’t be any easier if I did it for them, leading questions they’d have to try to get wrong or opinion-based inquiries they’ll still struggle to answer without prompting. Their movements are sluggish and reluctant, half resigned to getting it done as quickly as possible, the other half determined to use up the entire twenty minutes I’ve given them doing other things, and still not finish.
The hand is still raised. I gesture loosely, already penning a pass with the date and my signature for the unofficial hall monitors overly concerned with passless students walking ten steps from my door to do their business, yet assigning a single day’s punishment for breaking school property. I ask, even though I know I’m right:
I’m wrong. A head shakes “no.” Instead:
For the first time all class period I have their attention, those surreptitiously checking their phones and the ones in the corner who haven’t stopped whispering all period achieve a unicorn-rare hush. They’re waiting with baited breath for my answer, the one that will seal their fate as slaves to the bidding of my lesson plans or free them to goof off for the rest of the period with no repercussions. There’s no in between. They won’t do it just for the sake of doing it, not when they could just as easily not do it.
This is the generation of short attention spans, curated by an endless flood of social media that promises to whisk away boring lengthy videos and posts, sacrificing content for a quick fix and a burst of entertainment. I’m a victim of it too. But this is also the generation of rewards and quid-pro-quo, an expectation that all efforts in life will be returned in kind. Asking them to complete a task simply for the betterment of their education is laughable. I’m not inundating them with crossword puzzles and word searches, meaningless busy work I know won’t benefit them, will bore them to tears or disruptive behavior. The worksheet in front of them is beneficial to a larger project we’ve been discussing for over a week.
I’m not obligated to grade everything. Classwork is not optional. But classwork won’t get done unless it’s graded. I once completed fourteen hours of work only to receive a nod as my compensation, so I know the feeling of hard work going unrewarded. This assignment is barely fourteen minutes, if only they’d actually try. They think me supremely unfair, to ask so little of them for nothing in return. They’ll do nothing when allowed, and the bare minimum when required. In the immortal words of Ron Swanson, “[they]’d work all night if it meant nothing got done.”
The lie slips as easily from my tongue as a smile slips onto my face beneath my mask. There’s a silent, collective groan that has me grinding my teeth at the audacity of their outrage. They’re groaning at a single sheet of paper with answers that will help them later in the week. They groan at essays. They groan at creative work. They groaned at an open note test because the study guides I gave them weren’t for a grade, so they didn’t do them.
You can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make it drink.
The grumbling subsides, the chatty corner picks back up, and I circulate the room with help to give and no breath to waste telling them to put their phones away. A head lifts, followed by a hand, and I incline my head.
“Wait, what’re we doing?”
Sometimes, I really hate it here.
