Mr. Negative

Two incidents have bothered me this week and it made me realize how often we tend to focus on the negatives in life rather than look for the positive. I have a particularly difficult student who I constantly find breaking the most basic rules of the school. I'm not the only one, but she is convinced that I am the root of all her issues. We have a dress code and she is constantly out of dress code. She is a nexus of trouble, on her cell phone in school, swearing in the hall, getting into fights, destroying school property. She had been suspended five times since school started. I e-mail her mother all the time trying to figure out how to prevent her from failing the class and convincing her that she should behave. I have excused assessments and allowed late assignments for all her work. Nothing works - her mother wrote to say she thinks I am picking on her and yet I'm only a small percentage of her 15 referrals to the Principal.

As students were on their way to lunch, I saw this young woman in the locker bay in front of my class leaning up against the lockers with a young man grabbing her hips and beginning to grind. Of course, I call to them to stop and bring the young man into my classroom to tell him that he could get into trouble for that type of physical contact. He tells me I'm picking on him.

Some days I think it would easier to simply shut the door and ignore, but I just can't. I must have some OCD thing about following rules.

So I'm depressed. Then I remember another student, who fought me all last year. She stopped to tell me she liked my class and learned a lot. I think most of my students like me, but the greatest amount of feedback is the negative. Ironically, I think that is true for students as well. Teachers tend to tell them what they did wrong, not what they did right. I think I'll try to say a positive comment to each of my students this week and thank them for their efforts.

Well, maybe not all of them....