The one thing I really like about coaching young girls playing softball is the challenge, no I mean the strategy. It is challenging, way too challenging.
I don't mind the expected challenges. A kid missing a steal sign, or ignoring it because the are afraid to steal. But the challenges when you show a play how their mechanics at hitting limit their potential and their response is: "so what, I hit better than a lot of other players."
And continuing that defiance when you ask if what they want to do is be better, or just better than the other players.
I wish I could move into the better motivator when it comes to that. When it comes to the same thing in the classroom I feel that many students are not worried what their potential is, but in just doing a little better than others.
Another hard thing to do in the education process is to have kids accept responsibility. I created this 'scavenger hunt' (for the lack of a better phrase) to introduce research. To complete it you have to create bullets in a word document, use the opac and find some information about an artist using this e-book we have access to. The e-book is a list of biographies with most all the artist the students will be using in the project. The best thing about the e-book is at the bottom of each article lists the citation.
If you use an article, your citation is done for you. I realized about four students had not done the project right. Most of those had done everything, but saved the finished product in the wrong folder. The last two had just not finished it, low and behold, I noticed it.
During their lunch study hall the outlaws came down and finished it, which was quite a punishment since they lost out on some valuable time outside in the nice spring day. Probably the kid, call him Manual Labor that wants to go outside the most, is also the student who seldom does his homework. Manual's surrogate father explains it this way: "Manual believes there is a chance the world will end, even if it is a three percent chance, he does nothing in the believe that when the homework is done, the world will be kaput."
I've seen him in action. He will malign the truth to the bitter end. One time he was kept in unless he had his journal entries completed. He said they were done and brought back his journal. He kept flipping through the blank pages as if he was going to find what he didn't do.
I was helping him, which he didn't like because it meant I was making sure he did it. To begin with the instructions ask him to name the file 'art.doc' which he has yet to do.
So I leave, five minutes later he is go, I check the work and he basically stopped when I left.
I admire him for her fortitude, but feel sorry for his lack of understand that it is going to always come back and bite him in his outside (time). Of course by not doing the project he will hurt his grade direction, since that part of the assignment is pass fail. He will fail. The indirect outcome is the fact that if you learn how to cite the work you do, you are going to get a better grade.
I am not sure the outcome, but it is not good. I see what the president's No Child Left Behind has done is to drag kids along who never get done. Perhaps they aren't left behind, but they will never grasp what needs to be know. Manual isn't going to do the work and the choice is to continue to keep him back a grad. The reason he isn't doing the work is not knowledge, intelligence or my willingness to help him. It's his lack of willingness to do the work.Technorati Tags: education, small school, softball, technology, no child left behind, girls, boys
