“I’m terrible with names,” my mentor teacher laughed. It was the first week of school, and I was in the 7th grade language arts classroom in which I would spend the remaining six weeks. “Oh, that’s totally fine. It’s the first week of school, after all!” I attempted to reassure him, although it didn’t really seem like he needed the reassurance. When you see upwards of 140 students in a single day, it takes time to get to know them and to associate names with faces. I understood that, and that was okay. In the fifth week of school, though, I watched students shake their heads as their teacher mispronounced or forgot their names. Their disappointment was palpable. Students want little more than for their teacher to be personally invested in them, but how can they be when they can’t remember who you are? Given I had spent the first week or so of school completing various different sets of classroom files to store
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He told me that, by this point in the year, you can kind of tell the sorts of students that you will have for the next eight months based on their actions in those first few weeks. If they failed to turn in a number of less complex assignments, it would be unlikely that they would have a positive trend in the homework completion piece of their grade by the time the trimester rolled around. This conversation stemmed directly from an interaction with Devon, who had questions about assignments he had failed to complete in the few days before. I found myself asking so many questions about the circumstances in this moment – “What is his home situation like? Does he have any extra curricular activities that are sucking up his time? What is his family support network like? Do we know why he hasn’t completed these assignments yet? Is he understanding what he is being asked to do?” – but they fell on deaf ears, because I failed to ask them anywhere outside of my own
He told me that, by this point in the year, you can kind of tell the sorts of students that you will have for the next eight months based on their actions in those first few weeks. If they failed to turn in a number of less complex assignments, it would be unlikely that they would have a positive trend in the homework completion piece of their grade by the time the trimester rolled around. This conversation stemmed directly from an interaction with Devon, who had questions about assignments he had failed to complete in the few days before. I found myself asking so many questions about the circumstances in this moment – “What is his home situation like? Does he have any extra curricular activities that are sucking up his time? What is his family support network like? Do we know why he hasn’t completed these assignments yet? Is he understanding what he is being asked to do?” – but they fell on deaf ears, because I failed to ask them anywhere outside of my own