I thought that Chris’ Wants To Be script would be a huge success, and he thought so too, but it wasn’t. Let’s try to open up a thread about this, if we can. We can try to figure out what happened. It can be a very valuable learning experience. Here is Chris’ wonderfully honest follow up to the recently posted Part 1:
Ugh….well I jumped the gun on the positive email yesterday. In my class of 30, a little less than half (mostly boys) were really into it. My class consists mostly of girls and most of them just weren’t into it. The boredom for some looked painful meanwhile a few of them were pretty enthusiastic. Not sure what I can do.. I will be calling two parents today, one because the girl wasn’t paying attention, and one because a girl said “when are we getting our break?”. I’m thinking about eliminating the “brain break” in the middle of class. I don’t know how to make it more engaging though, I let them create the story with their answers. There are a couple of really negative kids in this class that I personally would love to have dropped from the class but our building administration doesn’t have much of a backbone against parents. The only way students will be dropped is if they are receiving a “C” in the class. I need to start getting more grades in the gradebook so I’m wondering if I should start giving out more quizzes that would start lowering the grade of the negative students who don’t pay attention? I could at least get them out that way and it would technically be “their fault” because they earned a C. Any suggestions on what to do? Any suggestions for ways to get more “grades in the gradebook”?
Chris
My comment: Wow. What a great description of what happened. The negative kids piece is huge. I will be addressing this in an upcoming Pigs Can’t Fly series of blog posts here. My thought Chris is that you keep plugging in spite of the negative kids. Really, they are just scared. This is too human a thing for their robotic little selves to have to do so they protect themselves in the only way they know how, by shutting down and trying to disrupt the good vibes happening around them. Meanwhile, go for the daily quizzes, give instant grades – rubrically determined in a flash – on any little dictation or writing thing, get all the grades you can. One of the drawbacks to the easy yes/no questions is exactly this, that negative kids can get a decent grade and still be disruptinve, but in your case with the C needed to drop you might be able to dump the kids who are darkening the walls of your classroom very easily. I would drop those two kids by getting their grades down to a C by any means possible. The group here will make suggestions, I hope. Drop the brain break, it can break the flow of the CI and slow down or stop the growing energy. I don’t do them any more. It is even possible to take the negative kids and turn the negative energy into positive energy simply by having great stories, but that can take a long time.
Ideas from the group? This is a big deal. We have to show up for Chris right now. Here he has started the CI ball rolling, the kids sense it, they don’t want it because it means they have to change and grow and become more compassionate and aware of others and interact with others in a positive way (not taught in too many middle schools that I know of) and so their pushback is real on Chris. Let’s get a good set of ideas on the table for Chris on this.
The Problem with CI
Jeffrey Sachs was asked what the difference between people in Norway and in the U.S. was. He responded that people in Norway are happy and
