180 days as a teacher

I decided to go ahead, bite the bullet and allow that difficult group of girls to also participate in the technology year-long project.

I'm doing so for a couple of reasons, the main one being that I am too lazy to actually come up with something else to occupy them while my 3 other groups will be spending lots of time in the shop/lab building the various pieces of their city.

Another reason is that I am hoping to finally reach out to them, grab them by the guts and shake some sense into them. Isn't that what all real teachers do?

They seem to have no interest still, although I have to say that our talk on tobacco (in biology class) was the first and only really good connection we had. It was of course a fleeting moment, a fleeting 30 minutes to be more precise. I REALLY want to get back there, not only in biology but also in technology. Just call me crazy, I don't care, I can't hear you - this is the internet!!!

So today, as I forced them to get into teams of 4 and come up with a project definition, the method to pick the project manager and decide how long this person would be queen of the castle, I was amazed (in a bad way) at how little energy they have, like at most one measly Joule for all 24 of them.

It became obvious they did not want the Project Manager to be picked by pulling a name from a hat. This may have proven to be a difficult task since no one was wearing any headgear, but I digress...

So I asked by show of hand (just so that I could get a mental picture) those who DID NOT want under ANY circumstance to be project manager for a month. Every single girl raised her hand. EVERY SINGLE ONE. Not one, not a shadow of one, not an inkling of one even wanted to give it a shot.

As I looked out the 4th floor window, I wondered who should be jumping out to a better place, me or all of them...

Perhaps this will lead me to a new way to pull together a project - one where no one is interested in participating, no one has ideas, no one has energy, and most importantly, no one is in charge.

Hmmm.... this almost sounds like the way the government runs its ship... perhaps I have a future bunch of bureaucrats in the making...