Celebrate the small things: full attendance

Full attendance is my elusive dream: at the beginning of each new term, at the beginning of each new week, at the beginning of each new day, I hope that all of my students will show up to class. Sadly, I have had to abandon my other dream that they would all arrive on time and stay until the end. I now that will not happen - but full attendance is possible, and this week I came tantalizingly close.

Due to the rarity of full attendance, I had cause to celebrate 'almost' full attendance twice this week. On Thursday and Friday, only one student was missing.

I am happy to teach whoever shows up. I start the class on time for those who can be bothered to be punctual, and late comers, miss out or have to catch up. Half of the class normally leaves after the second break, but I keep teaching in the last session for the benefit of those who aren't full of excuses about why they can't stay for another forty minutes.

It is annoying and disruptive to have students roll in like browns cows, and/or not attend whole days at all with no good reason, but the students themselves are the ones most affected.

They have to do five assessments every week. Students who are absent have to do those catch up exams when they show up, which means that while they are doing catch up exams which test their knowledge of skills they were not in class to learn or practice, I am teaching new content to those who did show up and who did do the tests. It's a vicious circle for students with poor attendance. Not only do they not learn new content, but they are continually tested on content they don't know, because they don't come to class. or when they do, they are busy doing catch up tests.

Nearly achieving full attendance this week means that all students are now up to date with their assessments, and I was able to teach new content to all but one for two days in a row.

I actually care about how my students perform. I may even care more than some of them do. Full attendance is a little thing, but it makes me happy, so today I'm celebrating 'almost' full attendance and the renewed hope that one day soon, I may get 100%.

The Experience of 31 Lifetimes

I'm currently doing a teaching practicum in a public primary school, and learning some surprising things. I expect to have a bucket load of stuff to say about this, and subsequent periods of professional experience, but here's just a bite in case you're not very hungry.

From my observations  of 30 Year 3 students and their inspirational teacher, a good learning environment is one in which there is order. Teachers maintain control and set good behavioural examples and the students follow them. A good learning environment is one in which students know what is expected of them, and understand, and therefore avoid to the best of their abilities, the consequences of misbehavior. A good learning environment is one in which courtesy and respect are evident, and students respond positively to having boundaries in place by being obedient and diligent. 

A good learning environment is not, despite how it sounds, a utopia. The structures of reward and consequence, of respect, responsibility and safety, operate in the imperfect world of the classroom where there always exists some degree of unpredictability. The beast we know as human nature means that the best  behaved child can have a bad day, and the worst, a good one. The teacher tries to maintain a good learning environment despite the all too frequent attacks of its enemies: extra- curricular activities like the Mother’s Day Stall, the Music Bus, Dance 2 Be Fit and the overnight excursion, and interruptions to lessons from students and even other teachers.

Being a teacher seems to be more about management and paperwork than it does about actual teaching. Those who can do it with passion and diligence have my undying admiration.