Teacher in Training

No. Really. You can’t teach the unwilling.

Here are options in my speech class:

Pick your topic, whatever you want as long as it fits the genre of speech (persuasive, narrative, etc.)

Research it however you want, either with print or web

Show me some progress points as you work

Make…

This whole post sums up a huge lesson I had to learn during my student teaching experience. I had kids in my classes that I genuinely cared about but they did not care about the class or school or learning. I had an assignment in my high school Drama class that were very similar to the options GWALP gave for her Speech class. I gave the students their choice of technical design, their choice of methods, and a MONTH of time in class to finish it and I was completely available both inside and outside of the classroom (I would get e-mails/phone calls as I was going to bed but I would answer my phone or respond to the e-mails before I went to bed…because I cared a lot about my kids). And guess what? I still had one student refuse to do the assignment. I sat down with this student and asked him “Why are you in Drama? What do you want to do after high school?” And I got a student with a raised eyebrow and no verbal answer. This bothered me to no end and I spent a lot of time trying to reach out to this student. It was emotionally and physically draining. Simply put, I cared too much. I had been warned by other teachers when I was still in college that I could not “save” everyone. I had one teacher call me “beautifully naive” in the sense that I thought I could change education. I believed I could change the classroom. I thought I could make every student care about school and that every student I had would be “college ready” upon graduation. As a “beautifully naive” student teacher, I learned a very hard lesson: you can’t teach the unwilling. You can make yourself available to the unwilling, but if they never come to you, you can’t do anything about it.

And that’s my two cents about this matter.