Seniors v. Freshmen

Ugh. That's about all I can say. As a high school teacher, I am faced with the challenge of teaching Seniors and Freshmen. I teach Freshmen most of the day, and I have one period of a Senior Novels course. Because they are at such different levels--maturity wise and academically--it is really difficult for me to plan my lessons sometimes.

I really LIKE my Seniors, and most of them are intelligent, but they just don't want to DO anything. I know they have Senioritis, blah blah blah, but can I really just expect NOTHING out of them? I require reading every night and the activities we do in class make it quite obvious if they are not keeping up with the reading. I require writing assignments and creative assignments, and nothing seems to catch their interest. I play relevant music (and even music videos) and half of the time they stare at me like I have 16 heads. So, I ask myself "Is it me? Am I really that ineffective as a teacher?" I'm hoping the answer is "No."

I have finally discovered something they like: fighting. Okay, not fist fight, but they like to argue and debate. We are currently reading Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried. About two weeks ago, I had the students write "thematic statements" for two of the chapters. We talked about theme for a little bit and I explained the difference between a "theme" and a "thematic statement." "Love" would be a theme, while "Love conquers all" is a thematic statement. They wrote their chapter thematic statements on note cards and turned them in. Little did they know what would occur the next day.

I typed up all of the chapter statements, but I did not include the author of each statement. I told the students to review the lists for each chapter, and I asked them to indicate on their papers which ones they did NOT think represented the given chapter. Finally, I told them that we, as a class, had to narrow the list down to the best statement for the chapter. Then, a beautiful thing happened.

They talked, yelled, and got up out of their seats while trying to make a point, but it proved one thing to me: THEY WERE CONNECTING WITH THE LITERATURE! This is any English teacher's dream, of course, so I was ecstatic. The debate lasted nearly the entire hour.

Last Friday, I decided that I wanted to get them riled up again. This time I came up with "agree" or "disagree" statements about war. For example, one statement was "The United States abuses its power when it comes to war." If a student agreed, he went to the front of the room. If a student disagreed, he went to the back of the room. And if a student was undecided, he remained seated. I told the students ahead of time that they needed to defend their responses at least twice. Little did I know that I could have required five different responses, because almost every student would not shut up (in a good way). We only got through 6 of my 10 statements, and it was great! Two different students asked me if we could do it again soon.