Lessons In Education: The Kid Is Sleeping
In three prior diaries in this series of diaries on quality education, I talked about the guidelines for being a good teacher, then I diaried about test score improvement here and spoke of personal experience with having kids speaking out in front of the class. My goal in this series is to share certain personal experiences with valuable lessons to be learned from each one. Real student names will never be used and although I have yet to do so to this point, I reserve the right to make minor modifications to a true story for privacy sake.
It's a little after 9, my heavy lifting class has begun. Prior to going in I overheard this kid talking about events at home which caused him to be up all night. I said nothing.
Class begun, about 10-15 minutes later this kid just conked out and feel asleep right in the middle of class. Of course a couple of kids had to point out to me that "-------" is sleeping. Now most teachers in this situation would start yelling and screaming for the kid to wake up, have somebody wake him up, and take this as a personal affront. How dare you fall asleep during MY lessons! And this is the wrong mindset.
When a kid isn't paying attention, ask yourself why. And that's what I did. Knowing what I overheard, I can't blame the kid for just falling asleep. Him falling asleep had nothing to do with me as a teacher and even if it did, so what.
When you put yourself in this kid's shoes, you would fall asleep as well. So what do you do?
In this case I just let the kid sleep. I told the other kids "shhhh" and then cracked a couple of jokes about how if I had me as a teacher I'd probably fall asleep as well because I am so boring. They I do imitations of the "boring" teacher. (I get a kick out of this because I'm literally imitating half the teachers in NYC and the kids are laughing because they are saying to themselves, "I had that teacher.")
When the kid woke up, I took it in stride, said it was my fault for teaching such a boring lesson and I'll try to make things more interesting the rest of the way.
Lessons to be learned in education.
It's a little after 9, my heavy lifting class has begun. Prior to going in I overheard this kid talking about events at home which caused him to be up all night. I said nothing.
Class begun, about 10-15 minutes later this kid just conked out and feel asleep right in the middle of class. Of course a couple of kids had to point out to me that "-------" is sleeping. Now most teachers in this situation would start yelling and screaming for the kid to wake up, have somebody wake him up, and take this as a personal affront. How dare you fall asleep during MY lessons! And this is the wrong mindset.
When a kid isn't paying attention, ask yourself why. And that's what I did. Knowing what I overheard, I can't blame the kid for just falling asleep. Him falling asleep had nothing to do with me as a teacher and even if it did, so what.
When you put yourself in this kid's shoes, you would fall asleep as well. So what do you do?
In this case I just let the kid sleep. I told the other kids "shhhh" and then cracked a couple of jokes about how if I had me as a teacher I'd probably fall asleep as well because I am so boring. They I do imitations of the "boring" teacher. (I get a kick out of this because I'm literally imitating half the teachers in NYC and the kids are laughing because they are saying to themselves, "I had that teacher.")
When the kid woke up, I took it in stride, said it was my fault for teaching such a boring lesson and I'll try to make things more interesting the rest of the way.
Lessons to be learned in education.
Well you got banned:
http://freespeechzoneblog.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=1702
And then unbanned:
http://freespeechzoneblog.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=1704
From FSZ.
Heads up.
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