Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Tired or Retired
I just had a student in my room last week who is in 6th hour Physics. We always allow students to come into 7th hour, which is our after hours open door tutor session. This is a student who has been doing fairly well on the homework and quiz, but he is just a touch behind where he needs to be. He had not turned in homework for the day, and Yeatts always says that the students can get credit if they come to 7th hour and complete the work. The student took the work off of the board during the 6th hour, and then tried to turn it in during 7th hour. He did not like that we had him redo the work, as this was just a copy. When he finished, he got very upset and said that this took too long to do (mind you, we were giving him back the credit that he had lost) and that he was way too tired to be doing this. We continued to work with him and explain why this is important. I thought about the scenario after we had left, and I decided, that the day that I am truly too tired to work with students, is the day that I need to retire.
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Phil that was short but genius. I think a large problem with our educational system lies with the tenure system and the fact that it allows teachers who really should be done to stick around until they decide retiring is a good idea. You are right though; the day anyone of us decides they do not want to watch their students succeed, each and everyone of them, is they day they should throw in the towel. We owe it to our students to give each of them our all everyday and anything less is failing them.
ReplyDeletePhil, this is very similar to the comment I just made on Alison's post. In the book, "Love & Logic - Teacherisms" it says that you cannot expect a student to be excited about school if the teacher is not excited. I think this rings true here also. If a teacher seems too tired or frustrated to help a student, how do we expect a student to act about being in the class and doing the homework.
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