“I've come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element in the classroom. It's my daily mood that makes the weather. As a teacher, I possess a tremendous power to make a child's life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration. I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis will be escalated or de-escalated and a child humanized or de-humanized.”
Dr. Hiam Ginott
Today I received some unpleasant news about my class: any student with three absences will lose credit for the course. For my class, that means losing three of the four students. And here's the kicker: they won't be told until after Thursday, so "it doesn't affect our statistics".
Our school operations manager (SOM) says that it isn't my fault and that we did nothing wrong, that these things happen. I feel like I failed. Either my class wasn't good enough for them, or I couldn't invest them enough to make them understand the importance of attending school regularly. Bummer.
I must do better next time.
I still have to teach the class, although we haven't had nearly full attendance this week. Today I'm teaching about global warming. In order to do this, I'm going to do this in the form of learning how to write a letter about global warming. Their project today is to write a letter to the editor of the New York Daily News in response to a recent article about removing a grove of trees from a park in the Bronx. I hope they will be able to explain that removing trees is deforestation, and since trees absorb carbon dioxide, there will be more carbon dioxide in the air, which is a greenhouse gas, and greenhouse gases cause global warming.
It is a simplified explanation, but it works. I wish I had the time to explain to them the different prediction models of the effects of global climate change and the debates over the IPCC data. Maybe next year.
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