Teaching is hard

On Monday I made a girl cry.

It was one of my favourite grade nines. We were taking up some square root homework on the board and I asked her to write up her answer. It was a kind of tricky question, and I had saved it with her in mind because she's really on the ball. The don't have calculators, so they need to look square roots up in a table. She got the hard part of the question correct, but made an error reading from the table. When I made the correction, she looked confused, so I asked if she understood. She kind of just looked out the window, so I thought she didn't hear and I asked again. Them the nodded and I saw the tears so I quickly moved on.

On Tuesday I got angry with a girl and recieved an eye roll.

I noticed part way through class that she had no books out and wasn't copying. I asked her to get paper out and start copying, and that I would wait to erase until she had caught up. Yes, it was a jerk move to single her out. But come on, right? After class I was erasing the boards and I dismissed the students. The started to leave, but I asked this girl to stay. I gave her a talk about 'why are you here? don't you come to school to learn?' which was really cliche in topic and execution, but I feel that cliches are handy sometimes. She rolled her eyes and started to leave, and so I even had to pull a 'excuse me, we're not finished talking.' All-in-all, i'm fairly sure she hates me, and I am okay with that.

Today I gave my grade tens a sternly worded lecture on academic honesty.

Monday through Wednesday from 4 to 5:30 they have some thing called group discussions, rotating through each subject so that they only have each subject every few weeks. Today was physics. We're doing moments and forces in equilibrium and they really aren't getting it. The text book emphasizes theory over worked examples. Last term they did forces and they were supposed to have learned the equation for torque/moments, but after a few days of puzzled faces, I looked through their notes and discovered only one example and no homework questions. So I backed up and taught moments properly, but they still really weren't getting it, so I made their discussion question kind of easy. I timed myself to see how long it took me to do it: two minutes, and only because the numbers made for some tricky math, and I'm laying off the calculator because that seems only fair. So I figured they would have plenty of time given an hour and a half. I left them with the question and then went to give computer lessons to some teachers. When I came back with ten minutes left, most groups were still hard at work. I gave them the ten minute call, a three minute call, a one minute call, them said pencils down. THEY DID NOT PUT PENCILS DOWN. This is my pet peeve beyond all pet peeves, because its clearly cheating but some people seem to have convinced themselves its not cheating. Dangerous. I said, loudly and firmly, 'pencils down right now' and then I went around collecting the booklets. And one girl would not give it! I told her that if she wrote anything else on the page, her whole group would get zero. She still wouldn't give it! She wasn't writing- she was giving pouty lips and puppy dog eyes. As if, lady. I took the book from her and then gave a rather long speech about dropping your pencil like its hot when I call time. The thing is that I think they still don't really understand me, so I'm not sure my point got across. But they better the heck have learned that you do not try puppy dog eyes on Lisa Farlow. (note to Jack and Rob: it's okay when you do it.)

i'm telling you, teaching is hard. On a not at all related note, I just heard a very loud moo and looked out my window to be practically nose to nose with a baby calf. Gross/cute!