I don’t hold certain kids – you know the ones – accountable much anymore. In middle school I don’t need to – the stories are too interesting. In high school I don’t know – the culture in certain schools of doing the least that one can in order to graduate is a hard factor and can really bring down a good storytelling class.
The only thing that I can do in response to that is ignore the dead behaviors in the room and spin an interesting story. I have had in certain schools really dead kids and lots of them in one room. It was like, what in the heck has happened here? Why are these kids acting like zombies?
I can respond to their lack of life in only two ways:
- Teach the best I can, which is enough. (I don’t have to teach like Blaine. What I do is good enough and we all are doing the very best we can with stories at any given moment and that is enough. See https://benslavic.com/blog/stuart-smalley/)
- Use ISR/jGR to let them know what I think of their sorry performance in reaction to my hard work.
For me (2) does not mean failing them which then creates a situation where their laziness causes immense new work for me with parents who often are not reachable and with fool administrators who want to know what I am doing wrong because they can’t imagine it might be the student, etc.
The term “holding kids accountable” is code for “forcing them to pay attention” and there is no room in what we do for that kind of stress on us. If a kid wants to be inert in class, I let them.
I just the give them a grade in the lower range of jGR to send my message. Since they give me nothing, I give them nothing. Then when June comes I say get out and go be dead somewhere else next year. They get the message. Please be clear, such kids are less common than they used to be. Ten years ago they littered schools, but I see that changing.
I used to subscribe to the myth of the super teacher using CI to rescue all dead kids in the building by the wonders of a good story, even though the kid is dead in all his other classes too. Now I see that is a formula for mental and physical health issues.
However, since this work with stories is a reciprocal and participatory process, I require a minimum of that kind of behavior from kids who are inert. With truly inert kids, I still require one thing – that they fake following the rules, squared shoulders, looking at me, no slouching, etc.
No kids in my room ever have permission to be visibly bored. I don’t have the psychic strength for that. I will be in their eyes and with my hand on their desks in a heartbeat. And I will stay there or send them out if they really must slouch. They will fake it until they make it or the year ends.
I always win those battles because I am a master of the bitchy edge when I need to be. When we signed up to be teachers we didn’t know that we had to also have training in psychic warfare as well.
There are actually teachers who try to get answers from such dead people. News flash – when a child is hiding deep down inside of a teenage body, inert, riddled with fear and uncertainty about life enough to look perpetually angry, then they need a lot more than a French teacher to coax them gently back into the world. They need a shaman and I have no training or background in that, and I would think that that kind of work should not be done in a room full of other people anyway.
So why would I ever ask a question to a dead person in the name of holding them responsible? They can’t answer because they are (hopefully only temporarily in their young lives) dead.
Of course, again, I am talking about only certain high schools where the culture is in passing and graduating only with the minimum effort. In middle school this is never a problem. The opposite is true – I have to keep them from happily yammering in French all period long so I can finish the story.
The one thing I have learned with stories is that I do my best and they do theirs. This is the 50% Rule that I added to my Classroom Rules more than ten years ago which (along with the power rule #2 that one person speaks and the others listen) continues to be my best friend in schools where kids think that they can get away with acting like dead people.
What amazes me is that so many TPRS teachers allow kids to slouch and out their heads down. Blaine in that video we just watched had a kid with a head on the desk. WTF?