Why I am Crazy...

One of students this year is a mess.  A complete and total mess.  He doesn’t want to do his work.  Not sure why… have asked him about it, have spent time sitting next to him to make sure he understand what’s going on and what he should be doing, have talked to mom, have talked to dad, have asked his friends, etc.  He just doesn’t want to do it.

My co-teacher has also attempted to work with the boy, to see if he’d respond better to a man (nope, he works better for me, and that’s a scary thought). 

He doesn’t want to do his work so much that he pretends that he is doing it so that you think he’s working.  Then, when it comes time to turn in his work, he doesn’t have anything.  Not even his name on his paper.  

Not.  Even.  His. Name.

 

He routinely pretends to not have a pencil so that, when you ask him why he hasn’t done anything since he entered the room 30 minutes ago, he can say, “Well, I don’t have a pencil!”

 

However, if you tell him that he will start writing in the next 60 seconds or he will have a lunch detention, he magically pulls a pencil from his backpack, where his mother has packed it for him. 

Sometimes he honestly doesn’t have a pencil, and I have a system for borrowing pencils, which he knows very well, but he doesn’t ask, and even when you tell him to get one, he won’t do it.  He’d much rather not have a pencil, because if he has one, he might have to actually work.

 Now, when I say that he pretends to work, I mean he has a pencil in his hand, and he moves it across his notebook, so that it looks like he is actually writing.  I mean, you can actually look at him directly, and he pauses in writing, seeming to think, then continues to move his pencil across his paper, not actually writing anything.  The only way to be sure he is actually writing is to go right next to him and look.  I have watched him actually pull out a pencil, look around to make sure no one is watching him, and snap the lead off the top of the pencil.  Then he just sits there, pretending to write.  When asked, a little while later, why there is nothing on his paper, he says, “My pencil is broken.” 

This might just be one reason I feel crazy this year.