Teacher Confessions #1: I hope some students will fail

George's test was using more red ink than I expected, but as I went over his answers, two things became abundantly clear: 1) George was going to fail the test; 2) I was perversely happy about it.  

Maybe more experienced, mature, or just better teachers don't experience feelings like this, but I do. I never realized how many complicated emotional processes being a teacher carries with it.  You get emotionally invested after working all year long to teach your kids, to get them to care, and to turn their efforts into results. I mean, just minutes before grading George's test, I was barely able to stop myself from cheering in the middle of the coffee shop where I had set up shop when I saw that Tony had gotten an A on his final exam.

Tony and George have been my most... challenging... students this year. My mentor teacher has told me that it will rarely get any worse than these two. They both demand an unreasonable amount of my energy and attention: talking, throwing fits, getting the class riled up, and being all around disrespectful. But they are very different too. George will have nothing to do with me or my class. He is above it. He is better than it. He refuses to even make eye contact with me when I talk to him, laughing off my chastisement and protesting his punishment. Tony's effects on the class are just as disruptive, but his approach is radically different. Whereas George would love to go through class without having to interact with me at all, Tony is in your face from the moment he comes into the room. He demands to be the center of attention. He will argue and yell and blow up in anger. If he doesn't get his way he will threaten to be even worse. But there is a greater difference between the two. Tony cares. He cares enough about whether I like him or not. He cares about whether the book we are reading is interesting or not. He can be prodded into caring about learning his lesson. At the start of the year, I tried extra hard to connect with and to help my "problem students" do better; George and Tony became my projects. But after a couple of quarters, I realized that George was having none of it. He didn't want my help. He couldn't bear my "heart to heart" conversations or challenges. He didn't even want my encouragement! In fact, he would smirk and laugh at me when I praised him. But Tony slowly started to change. Part of it was that it takes time to gain someone's trust, especially with many of my troubled kids, and it takes time to learn what each student reacts to, but regardless of "why"... Tony did start to improve. So when I graded his final and saw that he had gotten an A, when many of my more regularly good students did worse than him, I rejoiced. Once I finally tally up the grades, I think I will even call home and let him mother know. I am pretty sure it is the only positive phone call she has gotten about him all year.

But George is a different case. Part of the problem is that George is smart. For most of the year, he spends 15 minutes of a 20 minutes assignment fooling around and then scrambling during the last 5 minutes to finish... and then get a good grade. This always annoyed me. For me, the grade you get in a class should reflect two things: how hard you've worked in my class and how well you have grasped the material. In an ideal world, the latter part should flow from the former; but with kids like George, their decent grades do not reflect how little they have worked and how much grief they've caused me. So I was happy yesterday when I saw that he had done poorly for once.

I know that a good teacher should still mourn George's grade. The student's failure ultimately means that the teacher has failed to reach him. "If the student hasn't learned, the teacher hasn't taught" is a harsh but true adage. But "you can lead the horse to the water, but you can't make him drink" is also an adage that I have had to accept as a teacher. And sometimes the horse (or ass, in my case) won't start drinking until it starts to get parched. If you will allow me to extend this metaphor, Gerald has been standing by the stream laughing at me all year long without so much as a dry fleck of spittle on the edge of his mouth. Hopefully this failure will force him to cough, choke, and finally to plunge his muzzle into the water for a drink.


*As always, the names of my students have been modified.