Hopefully, you’re all familiar with the show This Week in Baseball. If you’re not, please stop reading because even the Communists love baseball. But This Week in Baseball was commonly referred to as TWIB, a reference backed up by various graphics before and after commercial breaks. Here I bring you teaching’s version of TWIB. But instead of celebrating the best of teaching, as TWIB did with baseball, I am sadly celebrating the worst. Or perhaps gleefully mourning the worst. Either way.
Week of March 15th – 19th
Incident One:
My students struggle with reading informational texts. We recently read a killer short story, which in our anthology, included a newspaper article related to the topic of the story. After teaching some basics of newspaper writing and reading, I noticed that the students needed more practice. So I cut out a very short article from the newspaper, gave them some simple questions about it that were easy to answer if one followed the tips and strategies I provided. Nearly every person got the questions wrong. The article was about Iran’s president calling our accounts of 9/11 a “big lie.” Many of my students, even the brightest ones, said that the main idea of the article was the 9/11 attacks and that the story took place on 9/11. Complete inability to distinguish important and unimportant ideas in nonfiction. But it gets worse.
My purpose in assigning this article was not to discuss Iran or any current events involving Iran. But some prior knowledge was needed to understand parts of the article, so I provided it in very general terms. One shining bright spot in my daily teaching travails is that the ignorance of the students often causes them to ask questions that lead to great discussions. They’re not dumb kids, but no means. They’re ignorant. They’re isolated, and despite the amazing excess of technology they have, they don’t choose the media that provides information, rather only that which entertains. (Note to all school administrators: technology won’t save our education system, just like pumping more money into it hasn’t worked for the past fifty years).
So we got to talking about Iran, their recent elections, demonstrations, and violent clamp down on the opposition. I talked briefly and generally about other countries in which to vote for a certain person may cause you to be killed or jailed. I mentioned that sometimes a man’s wife might be raped in situations like this.
One male student: “Well, maybe she deserved it.”
I was flabbergasted. I told him that was a horrible thing to say and soon the girls started to yell at him. That was refreshing. Then he says, “Well, maybe she shouldn’t have been in the building.” Somewhere in this student’s words can be seen the precise moment of America’s downfall.
While this discussion is taking place (which means multiple people are talking, and in this case, a certain level of female vehemence being directed at this brave but woefully lost boy, another boy, who during the whole previous conversation had been talking to the girl next to him, so that he surely didn’t hear the whole conversation. But he heard enough to dispense some of his wisdom for those of us less fortunate:
“What I’m saying is maybe she lying. Maybe she liked it.”
I thought my unbelief had reached its limits. I simply told this boy that I hoped he never got a girlfriend. He then tried to argue his point to me and the girls who were now on his case. I started to get a little angry, and I cut him off by saying I knew people who had been raped and that many women said rape was worse than death because with death at least something ends. One girl raised her hand and said she saw a show in which a woman who had been raped said she wished she was dead. Thankfully, this turned the conversation from the male ignorance in the room, and we proceeded with our lesson.
Incident Two
Lately we’ve been working on spelling words with double consonants correctly. For example, many of my students spell “stopped” as “stoped.” So we’ve done various exercises to fix the error. On the first day when I explained the rule before we did a major exercise on it, saying that the double consonant makes the vowel before them short and that one consonant makes the vowel before it long, I heard a kid saying in the most dumbfounded tone, “I don’t get it.”
Now, I hate when someone says, “I don’t get it.” It’s an unacceptable sentiment that will cause you to lose in life. If your boss tells you to do something, will he smile on you say, “I don’t get it”? Not at all. You’ll be living in a van down by the river. The proper response is to either shut up and figure it out for yourself or, if you can’t do that, to ask pointed questions. “I don’t get it” is a the surest sign a person has either given up or is unwilling to try to get it.
But beyond my frustration at the laziness of “I don’t get it,” we weren’t talking about some deep piece of literature, how to diagram dangling modifiers, or explain why someone hasn’t killed Stephenie Meyer. We were talking about how to spell stopped!
That’s it for this week’s edition of TWIT. I’m too frustrated to comment further.
Bellicose Blatherings 
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