Teachers are master manipulators

I've realized recently that my classroom has become my students' living room.  JT and Jon have this new habit of walking into seventh period and taking off their shoes before they sit down.  The farting continues, and today Jon walked around with his khakis around his ankles (he had shorts on underneath, but still...)  It is really nice to see Jon happy though.  For a few weeks he was in this slump where he looked miserable and slept through all of his classes.  Last week I gave him the most amazing guilt trip ever, telling him, "You know you are one of my favorites, and I really don't want to have to write you up...I thought you respected me as much as I respect you, but the fact that you aren't trying shows me I'm wrong.  You're making me feel like I'm a failure as a teacher."  He looked at me, almost speechless, and sat down and finished the Algebra test he had avoided for three days.  It was beautiful.  I feel like I do a lot of manipulating and mind-games in order to get them to do even a little work these days...


During lunch today I looked up my 7th period students' grades, and literally almost had a panic attack.  After freaking out in the hallway to my co-teacher and the biology teacher, I set up my projector and typed a new Do Now:


"Data set:  the number of classes each student in this room is currently failing:  4, 4, 4, 4, 3, 3, 2, 4.   Find the mean, median, and mode.  Which measure of central tendency best describes this data?"


They sat down and began doing the mean, median, and mode, without even understanding the point I was trying to get across.  When I explained how frustrated I was and how we really had to work at this,  Carolyn looked up at me with an evil little smile and asked, "Miss, you're tired of our shit, aren't you?"  


"Yes, yes I am."


I mentioned to my principal how bummed I was that their grades dropped so dramatically, and she told me this point in Term 3 is a huge slump for all of the students, but it hits the Resource kids the hardest (and she saw this exact same thing happen with my kids last year), so I'm going to try not to stress too much.