The Chronicles Of Nay

Hello family friends and readers! How are y’all doing tonight? I have had a rough few days that have led to a rough couple of weeks. These frustrations and thoughts have been weighing on my mind and heart heavy lately. I don’t speak for my district, my school, my state education system. I speak for me. My feelings, my beliefs and my frustrations. So if you are going to be rude or hateful please stop reading now, I don’t have the energy to deal with you too! 

I played hooky from work today, I took what I like to call a mental health day. Like I said I have been struggling lately.  let me explain just a little bit of what I’m dealing with. I have 167 students that I am responsible for. I am responsible for laying some groundwork for their science education that they will take into all science classes going forward! Of those 167 students I have students that have never engaged. Let’s look at this six weeks alone. This is week 5 of the 6 weeks so in these five weeks I have 5 students that I have not seen once. I have 8 kids I have seen 1-3 times. I have students that come in do the attendance question or log into the Google meeting for less than a minute and disappear. My district has said that these students get attendance credit for doing that. Remember attendance doesn’t equal grades. So let’s talk grades, I have 32 students with zeros in my class. As in they haven’t done a single assignment in 5 weeks. I have 34 students with a 1 to a 20 in my class. Which means they have probably done 1 of the 7 assignments and then I have 73 students with a 21 to a 69 in my class. In FWISD 60 is still an F we don’t do D’s. These students are failing simply because they’re not doing anything. I have a lot of beliefs about grades and such but I won’t fail a kid that’s trying. These are the kids that are simply not turning in work. In case you lost count that leaves 28 out of 167 students that are passing.

We did a layers of the earth project that was supposed to be due the Wednesday of snowvid. We do this project every year.  The kids create a 3D model of the layers of the earth. Usually they bring them in to present them. This year I decided that the students would just create a video and turn that in. because the project was due when we were out of school dealing with no power and freezing temperatures I pushed the due date out to the following Tuesday. And then since we still didn’t go to school on Tuesday I pushed it out to Thursday so instead of getting a week to do the project my students got 2 weeks and a day. At the due date I had 25 students that had completed the assignment. I had one kid that told me “Miss I’m not going to do the project because I’m going to be in Detroit.” I told him “I’m sorry going out of town is not an excuse for not doing the project that you have had 2 weeks to do. Earlier this week he said “Ms I didn’t do the project because I was in Detroit” I told him “honey you have been home from Detroit for a week.” I had another kid who just submitted the assignment guidelines without actually doing it and she told me “Ms I’m not going to do the project because my family is too busy.” I am sure some of you are thinking “aww come one Naomi show these kids grace. These are tough times.” My question is where do we stop “showing them grace” and start “holding them accountable”. I understand that these kids are going through so much right now. However we cannot just use education for the dialogue that best fits our mood. Either we are trying to educate these students or we are just here to hope they do something. We are still doing state testing which means they expect that we are educating them. But at every turn people are telling us to give them grace, to be more flexible. 

I don’t know what to do. It is alarming how many of my students or their parents don’t care, or have the time for school. Our district does so many things to allow these students the resources they need to be successful. We have given out hotspots and computers. I give so freely of my personal time. I answer text messages and phone calls in the evening from confused parents and students. I spend hours on the weekend updating grades with late work submissions. However, it never seems enough. I have students emailing me telling me to change their grade because they have turned in missing work. I have parents emailing me telling me that their kid showed them they have no missing work. 

This is where I am going to lose some of you. I believe that students need to be in school. I am not a scientist, well I mean I am but I am not one that specializes in the spread of germs and such. I am one that specializes in the molding of young minds. Right now education is failing these students. The students are allowed to come and go as they please, they are allowed to use the circumstances to do what they please. The mental health of our students is suffering. They miss their friends, they miss the change of scenery, they miss getting away from their younger siblings for a few hours. Virtual learning doesn’t work for most adults. Try it! It is hard! My mom did her bachelors like that and it took so much discipline and focus. If it takes that of an adult how do we expect kids to do it easily? 

All this panda-nemic (If you haven’t seen that tik tok click the words tik tok. Should take you there!) has done is it has made a broken system more noticeable. Every day I feel more and more like a failure. I feel like I am constantly being told that I am not doing enough. I don’t have enough kids doing work, I have too many kids failing, I am not doing enough interesting lessons to make the kids WANT to come to class. I should be doing more lessons that have this or that. I should be reaching out more to my failing and disengaged students. However I am only one person. I can only be hung up on, called a liar, sent to voicemail, be lied to and be ignored so many times. It breaks my heart that I only have 28 students passing. However I don’t know what to do. Like I said people need to stop using education to fuel their side of the argument. The bottom line is this. Our students aren’t learning, our students are trying to survive. Our teachers are trying to survive. Being told to show them grace yet holding the teachers to the same standards as in a “normal year” isn’t helping anyone. So before you yell at a teacher, or tell them that your kid has done all their work please consider not. I promise you we are doing the best we can. We are up till all hours of the night working on lessons, thinking about the mental health of your students and crying that we feel we are failing.