A student ate her assignment today. No lie. I thought I´d seen it all after leaving Watts, but apparently not.
In class this morning she said she didn´t want to work(nothing new for her..aarrghh!) and asked if she could do it at recess. I said no and she sullenly sat down like she was going to die. At recess I gave her a friends notebook to copy the notes from since i´d already erased the board. this other girl has nice writing so i thought it wouldnt be a problem. boy am i stupid! I took her to the 10th grade room thinking it would motivate her. She said she didn´t want to work because she didn´t bring a snack and she was very hungry. Her mom, now a teacher at our school, decided she ¨couldn´t¨send a snack since her daughter forgot to take her lunchbox home yesterday. I think there´s another way of teaching her to remember her lunchbox, but hey, i´m not a mom.
so after recess she comes back to my room and NOTHING! hadn´t written a word! she said it´s because she couldn´t read the writing of the other student. well, hello, you couldn´t come ask me 25 minutes ago? EXCUSES! all the time with this girl!
so at lunch, right after she finished eating, she came to me a little more chipper and told me she was going to copy the notes from another student whose writing she could read. Fine, great, thanks, i said to her. One minute later she comes back to where I´m trying to peacefully eat my ramen noodles and says she doesnt have her original paper from the morning. ¨Why not?¨, I ask, thinking she´d say she lost it or she stepped on it, etc. Ï ate it¨, she said. ¨You what???!!!¨
I was so irate, i saw her mom standing outside. Her mom didn´t have much to say to her, only that she shouldn´t do that. Ah! what do you do in a situation like that? The students pointed to her belly when her mom asked where was her paper. All I could think to say was that next time she wanted to eat paper she should choose that wasn´t an English assignment.
She DID say she was hungry, after all. poor child!
ReplyDeleteI'd rather eat an english paper than math! Janice has about a dozen students of this calibre in her class and it's all but taken the joy out of teaching for her this year.
ReplyDeletewhen i was in the sixth grade, i was surrounded by students like that... and some of them continued that ethic all the way through high school. its only just now that some of them have started to clean up their act... but i judge them not, mainly because i can't think of anything to say.
ReplyDelete"Peoples is peoples" is a good quote that comes to mind for a situation like this.
WOW I thought my kids came up with excuses about homework but never that they ate it! But like Mom said, she DID say she was hungry!!
ReplyDeleteOh my goodness...that is hysterical. I'm cracking up here at my computer. I'm sorry you had to go through such frustration, but hello? That is FUNNY!
ReplyDelete