Today I tried something in my impossible 7th grade class. Today I called up students to bring their chair to the front of the room to be near me. I called them one at a time, and only called the people who were silent and I could tell were sincerely interested in learning. All year these poor kids had been screwed over by their immature and disrespectful peers and finally I decided to just give up on the others and pay attention to the good ones. I gave a really great thirty minute class on most common English mistakes for Spanish speakers and the kids asked questions and practiced.
My sole intention was to give a handful of kids some information that would truly change their everyday speaking and make them a step above the average English student from my year's worth of personal observations. I really didn't care about the other kids in the class. At all. They were free to yell and laugh and be their usual apathetic selves.
And so you can imagine my SHOCK when they all fell silent - and stayed that way. They were all listening INTENTLY at what I was telling the five or six kids at the front, even though I didn't even look up at them. It was the weirdest thing... You mean all I had to do this whole year was ignore them?!? What?!? By making an elite group in the class, suddenly everybody wanted to be in that elite group - and not because they were going to be punished in anyway, but simply because they personally had the desire.
O_o
I hope I will remember this next time I have an impossible class - but who knows if this was just a random fluke or not!? I don't want to have any more classes with these students than I need to, but I would be very interested to see if I can repeat the results I got from this little experiment today. ;)
XOXO
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