High school is kinda scary...

My experiences so far tell me that I like Middle School students better then high school students. Well, that's not quite right, I don't necessarily like high school students less, I just like teaching them less. The apathy is astounding. I'm sure it doesn't help that I have a really unique and particularly challenging group of students. Many of the A3 students are kids who have tried other high schools and been unsuccessful. Also, since it is an art high school, there is a high volume of math phobics. I am also truly appreciating how difficult it is to start with students half way through the year.

Yesterday my lesson started out ok, if not particularly exciting, but then, when we got the interesting part, I floundered. We spent some time with vocab, before doing a neat little activity called polygon brainstorm.

I should preface this by saying that the classroom I'm using is less then ideal. For Monday and Tuesday I didn't have enough tables for all of my students so five of them were on the floor, or just in chairs. It just so happened that that group of students was also my loudest and most challenging group. Not just that, but it is a shared space with lots of windows and mirrors (that can be distracting) that is a block and half away from the main school. There are minimal in classroom supplies available, and I can't get into the classroom before my class starts, so any classroom prep that I want to do has to happen in the five minutes as the students are milling into the room, and setting up the extra tables. Fortunately today (Wednesday) I got my fifth table, so everyone is now at tables.

So, since I have a very heterogeneous group of students, some finished really quickly, others took forever. But for the most part it was ok, until we moved on the formula invention activity I had planned.

I should say I was not entirely prepared to teach that activity. I had ideally planned for it to be the activity for Wednesday, but since I wasn't sure how long the brain storm activity would take, I wanted to make sure that if they finished early, I had something for them to do. Well they finished early, not just early but 30 minutes early. So I plowed right into the equation invention activity, and totally botched the explanation. It's a really logical activity to me. There are large shapes of a right and nonright triangle, a trapezoid, and a parallelogram and you have to cut them up and make them into rectangles in order to invent the equation for them. Seems like a really visual, really great way to make sure that students understand the origins of formulas. They were totally lost, and not just confused, but vocally expressing how lost and confused they were and how stupid they thought the activity was. It was all I could do to try and help those students who were actually trying, let along try and get those off task back to math.

Today I had a behavior problem as well, but this was one I was more prepared to deal with, although I've never had a confrontation go this far before. I have a student who is autistic. He is not super high functioning, but he also isn't severely handicapped by it. He's a huge geek, in fact this is the kid that I discussed D&D with a few weeks ago. He was blatantly not participating in the flash card/vocab activity they were working on. Not only was he not participating, but he was being really rude to one of his group members who was trying to get him to do something. I asked him to participate, and suggested some solutions for how they could both work on the project and he flipped out an started saying how stupid the assignment was and how he didn't have his notes, and that if he wrote down this stuff it would mean he was stupid etc. He was starting to get really loud so I asked him to leave the room with me, and he refused. So at this point, inside I'm freaking out. I have this combatant 14 year old boy who has all sorts of negative experiences with school and probably especially group work, who is flat out refusing a direct instruction by me. Finally after some insisting using my "I'm serious" voice he agreed to leave. At this point the teacher (not Danny, my cooperating teacher, but Aaron, his partner teacher) joined me in the hallway, though she let me take the lead in the discussion with him. The kid wouldn't let me say much, just kept repeating himself, and how it was stupid to write stuff down, and asking why I was treating the class like kindergartners etc. he specifically said that just because he's autistic doesn't mean he's stupid, which indicates to me that he has had people call him stupid because of his autism before. I wasn't making any progress getting him to even listen to what I was saying, let alone convince him to work on his assignment. Aaron finally joined me and her strategy was to ask what we could do to make the assignment more interesting. She had noticed, where I had missed, that he was saying that the assignment was boring. I had gotten caught up in the 'taking notes makes you stupid' comment, and forgotten what has started the whole conflict. Finally he agreed to do the assignment, and we went back into the classroom. One thing that was interesting to me throught this interchange was that he kept trying to leave and go back to class, and I had to physically stand between him and the door, and actually put my hand on the doorknob to prevent him from going back into the class. It was clear that he didn't like the attention from the teachers, and wonder if the fact that we were both women had any effect on his attitude.

After he rejoined the class he made flashcards, but he just made them randomly of words he could think of instead of the six words that he and his group had agreed to do. Only two of his other group members were there, one is very smart and tried hard but is a smart aleck and talks a lot. The other was a girl who was very smart, and I think already knows most of this, she was working on the flash cards, by drawing anime faces on the ones she had already finished (She proceeded to do that for the rest of the period, despite my gentle reminders to do otherwise). So the boy who was trying hard was extremely frustrated. He was one of my problem kids from Tuesday's lesson, and he wasn't any trouble today, but I could see on his face he was ready to just give up because of how frustrating his group members were, and honestly I don't blame him. if I were in his position, I would probably be a pain to my teachers too. I'm not sure what to do about that group. Aaron and I are going to meet during lunch to talk about today's incident.

The other thing that I've notices with high school students is that I relate to them really easily and well, which makes it that much more difficult to maintain a sense of authority with them, especially in this environment. I'm finding it hard to fit into the culture of the school, while still being an authority/teacher figure.