The End

The marathon is over.  The Wild Things have gone home (or what passes as home).  All that’s left is bits of ratty paper and crumbly memories strewn through my room, through me.  A school year.  Nine-ish months of intense proximity.  Just like a pregnancy, only with 20: viginitituplets?  Puts Octomom to shame.

As I look back on this year, I realize maybe I was partly to blame.  Granted the Wild Things came from a different land, a classroom where they were allowed to play legos and airplane erasers instead of learning how to read and write and understand that math (at their level) is about taking numbers apart and putting them back together (parts and wholes).  Granted this crew had a vast number of family issues (just last week fuzzy wuzzy Jose’s mom walked out on her two boys, Evan’s dad got a new girlfriend with her own set of kids, Roberto was taken back to Mexico to stay with his mom who left two months ago, Griselda moved, and Avery, who arrived three months ago after moving to Arizona after having left our school a year earlier unable to read and write and therefore repeated 2nd and still barely reads, though his parents say he reads perfectly at home, didn’t show up for a week).  Granted many things.   But.

I look back and see that, though I loved them, I didn’t love them the way I loved previous classes.  Maybe it was that I was still attached to my last batch.  Maybe, as my child grows older, I relate better to students who are older.  Lots of maybes.  But.

I do know this.  Or rather, I did learn this, this year.  There is a tipping point in classes.  I have a bond with almost all of the kids in this class (one of my colleagues watched us together for half an hour, and she said, “There so much cariño (affection) between you all!”  But.

When 8/19 misbehave on a regular basis, the class and the teacher focus on discipline rather than love of learning.  The dominant mode of the class is not academic.  Children infect one another with goofing off rather than wanting to learn.  The classroom is overcome by a negative epidemic rather than a positive one.

There was a day last winter, perhaps back in March.  I don’t remember if I wrote about it.  We were having a virulent bout of Won’t-Do-My-Homework-or-Classwork-itis.  Despite being told that this would have consequences, namely no computer lab or art or music, the infection persisted and spread.

Finally, one day, I’d had enough.  I didn’t think it fair to keep punishing the kids who did do their work just because a large number of kids weren’t doing their work.  I decided that I’d show the episode of the amazing BBC, Kenneth Branagh-narrated Walking With Dinosaurs I’d planned to show during our fossils unit.  But I’d only show it to the kids who had done their work.  I’d escort the others to another 2nd grade class whose teacher agreed to house them for 50 minutes.

I thought more than half the class would be leaving.  I warned the other teacher (and thanked him profusely).  But when I checked the work, I saw that it was only 8 kids out of 19 who hadn’t fulfilled their educational responsibilities.

I walked them to the other room and returned to find my remaining 11 busy at work.  They were studiously filling out workbook pages on regular and irregular verbs.
“OK guys,” I said.  “We can start the video now.”

Eleven heads ignored me.

I decided to give them a bit more time.  The room was quiet except for a few whispering consultations about verbs.

Ten minutes passed.  It was the end of the day.  If we didn’t begin the video now, we wouldn’t finish it.

“Ready, guys?” I urged.

Again eleven heads ignored me.

“Guys?” I pleaded.  “It’s a really terrific video and you all deserve it for how hard you’ve been working?!”

No response.

Finally, Isabel raised her head.  “Ms. B?” she asked.  “Is it okay if we just keep working instead?  It’s so nice and quiet right now.  I like this.”

I was flabbergasted.  This is what the class could have been if the eight didn’t tip it the other way.   Could have.  Would have.  Should have.  We never got to the video.

The tipping point.  What could I have done?

I have a summer to think about it.