Struggling To Find The Lost Children

One of the heartbreaks of teaching is the inability to "reach" a student. Serious teachers lose sleep over certain kids.

They spend hours planning enrichment activities to engage reluctant learners. They tweak their classroom environment in attempts make it ever more learning friendly. They search for resources, consult other teachers, and take continuing education classes to expand their own knowledge. And when all this effort fails, they take it personally.

It used to be that most of the kids in a classroom wanted to learn. Some may have had learning disabilities or medical problems that posed a barrier. Over the years, we've learned to address those issues, and for the most part, the roadblocks to those kids' learning have been removed or very greatly reduced. But there's a type of student showing up more and more frequently in today's classes that I can't quite figure out.

These kids simply don't care to learn. They have the intelligence, the aptitude, and the ability. They simply choose not to use them for academic purposes. And that might even be fine if these children simply kept to themselves. But instead, most use their talents to call attention to themselves, disrupt class, and keep the other children from learning.

Do they do it out of jealousy? Do they do it as a way to demonstrate that they have personal value, if not as an academic, then at least as a rebel? Do they do it because they have lifelong dreams of becoming a stand-up comedian? To a teacher, these kids can be as much a mystery as an irritant.

There are studies and books and reports ad infinitum on "Motivating the Unmotivated Student." Some suggest their ennui stems from a lack of self-confidence or low self-esteem, or that it comes directly from the examples set at home. Some say that these kids simply can't handle even the most minimal pressure. Whatever the source, it's a huge challenge for any teacher to provide instruction in a room with kids whose daily goal is to prevent as much teaching as possible.

Most of these kids desperately need individual attention. But it's nearly impossible for the classroom teacher to provide that to these few in a room of 20 or more. The teacher has already worked hard to design a lesson plan that accommodates several different learning styles, includes extended learning for a broad range of academic abilities, and is also friendly to ESL students. Differentiated instruction cannot be stretched to fit these misfits as well. Currently the only resources teachers have for modifying negative behavior in these kids is punishment - taking away privileges, calls home, parent conferences, after and in-school detention, etc. And punishing them reinforces their sense of lack of worth.

One veteran teacher I know suggested tongue-in-cheek that we round up all these kids and give them their own class. That way they could be as disrespectful and non-compliant as they wished, and not keep anyone else who actually wanted to learn from doing so. I admit that on certain days I have wished such a thing were possible.

Instead I keep searching for ways motivate these kids and stop their disruptive behavior. It's just one more thing on a list of teacher "to do's" that gets longer every day, just as my and other teachers' jobs get harder. It seems that each day there's more paperwork, more rules, more standards, more testing goal, more measurements of achievement, more meetings, and more compulsory events outside school hours. Add to that the challenge of teaching in what can seem at times like a battle zone, and teaching becomes less of a vocation and more of a job. But teachers are not quitters. We'll keep trying to do what we do to the best of our abilities, and we'll continue to lose sleep over the kids we can't help.