Despite being broadly satisfied with my job and chosen career, nevertheless I have days when I end up deeply pessimistic about my abilities as a teacher, and that always sends me off on a kind of spiral of self-doubt and fruitless, fantastical ideation about alternate career paths.
Yesterday was such a day. My difficult middle school HS1-T cohort persisted in being difficult. How can such smart kids be so completely uninterested? Not only uninterested in learning, but even deeply uninterested in the social contract we call a cohesive classroom. They just do whatever the hell they want.
It's like teaching English to cats. The cats just move around and do their own thing, and look on at the teacher, somewhat amusedly, from their utterly inhuman viewpoint. Meanwhile if the thought crosses their mind, they will play or attack one of their peers. Or open a window. Or get up and leave the classroom. Yelling and screaming feels like at best an utterly temporary fix: it can get the cats to sit still and feign detached attentiveness for maybe 30 seconds or 2 minutes, but soon enough a new whim will take one or more off on their secret tangent again. And yet bear in mind: this collection of students has the highest average score on English proficiency of any class at Karma.
I've never had a class quite like it. Normally, collections of high-scoring students are also well-behaved and fairly engaged learners. I don't know how to control these kids in any kind of positive way. I can only flail and yell and produce reactions of reluctant, very brief compliance. My gut feeling is that the classroom dynamic is driven more by the social interaction among the students than their individual personalities. It's a kind of toxic combination of teenage competitiveness and camaraderie. They're each trying to outdo or impress their peers in acts of passive-aggressive rebellion. My instinct in moments of highest frustration is to try to separate them into individual workers, and cut off social interaction – but that's almost impossible, and produces seething waves of angry resentment. And anyway, doing so doesn't make sense in a class where I'm supposed to be focused on the communicative, speaking function of language.
Argh.
[daily log: walking, 7km]
