Conundrum

I’m back teaching at school and I woke up in the middle of the night trying to resolve a problem with a group of students. They are ‘my’ students, my group that I’m supposed to follow for the next four years. I doubt that any of them, or my colleagues, will read this, but I still need to make sure the situation is anonymous so that no one is called out.

My students didn’t want to do anything yesterday, and were actively trying to be annoying. I can see two possible reasons for this. One could be that the school days were shortened last week because of the heat. They were all going home after my class so that might be it; their brains were on the way out the door already.

The other reason could be that maybe they were miffed with me, because they didn’t listen to instructions. I met them for the first time on Monday, and told them, clearly and several times “although it’s on your schedule, we don’t meet tomorrow, Tuesday, and I will see you on Friday”. Some of them showed up anyway for our weekly meeting on Tuesday. They could be angry about that and ‘wanting to show me’ by bad behavior in our class together.

There is also a possibility that there are one or two charismatic jerks in the class who are ‘going to show me’ how much power they have. There’s one girl, and maybe one boy, but I think if it’s that, it’s more in the girl camp.

I have a plan to cover my rear for the ‘you didn’t tell us’ camp; during our next meeting, they are going to write an email to themselves, with me copied, with all the things I’ve asked them to do, and all the important information they’ve received.

I have to give them lots of information; that’s my job and that’s the beginning of the school year. They’re new at this. The email should both help them remember what to do, and cover me if they say ‘I never said something’ to them that they needed to know. We’ll see how that goes….

The thing that makes me worried is that I got angry with them (or I needed to show them that I was serious) and I wasn’t really sure how else to get them to do what I asked them to do. Were they waiting for that? Did they think that I was ‘nice’ and that they could attempt walk all over me? When I reacted by stomping down, is this what they needed to hear? By appearing angry (and I thought about it after, was I really angry or was I just trying to get them to do what I asked, I think after the fact that it was 50/50) did they think they ‘won’ (hey, we made the prof angry, ha ha)?

I don’t know the answers to any of this, but I’m looking forward to Tuesday to see how they act and react. I will not lose any more sleep over it.

I didn’t really lose any sleep, anyway, simply because today was a day to sleep in, eat breakfast late, go for a walk before the rain and then spend the day relaxing. If I slept or didn’t sleep, it was all the same to me.

It’s finally cooling off after a record breaking week.