Keep up your efforts, your helping an “old coach” learn a few new tricks for assisting students to learn marth.

This is the real struggle for me in my classroom…i teach Special Ed, and my students have a kind of reinforced helplessness, where they may have found in the past that if they said something was too hard, they would get immediate help. Seven months into this school year, and they still will ask for help or say something is too hard before even trying to engage in an activity that I know they can make an honest attempt at, even if they wouldn’t have complete success. There are days where I feel so frustrated that they won’t make that first attempt, even after I’ve made it abundantly clear that it’s ok to make mistakes as long as they try their best.

It feels a bit overwhelming to me to be a spotter for 30 people at once, but I think I could teach 30 people to knit at once. Or maybe not knit, but I think you know what I mean.

I think rather than trying to spot 30 kids at once, I’d like them to be able to spot each other. By becoming the teachers, they will learn that much more! Plus, I will feel much less overwhelmed by my job.

I can only chalk this up to impatience or implusiveness. There are a few students that just can’t handle students not knowing the answers or just want to get class moving along because they’re bored. Either way I agree it’s a buzz kill.

Though completely off topic, this reminds me of the students that don’t even attempt to do work of any kind rather than being told before thought processes can occur. To those kids, my favorite saying goes something like this…

“I can correct wrong, but it’s very hard to correct nothing.”

The spotter for me is too temporary a role, too focused on the micro but I’m probably over analyzing.