There's the Door!

"I wanna go home, Ms. Sample", was the exclamation of the night from one of my students.  He was totally unmotivated tonight as well as last night and I had had all I could stand.  Last night he had the same attitude and the same lack of motivation.  Ironically enough, he came to my desk and demanded that I "motivate him".  I looked him dead in his eyes and said, "I can't make you do anything you don't want to do.  Motivation comes from within.  I would ask you this...how bad do you really want it"?

He stood silent at my desk as he played with a pencil looking down.  He seemed more interested in the pencil than what I had to say.   Some time later, he exclaimed yet again, "I wanna go home, Ms. Sample".  "There's the door!" I told him in a slightly aggitated voice.  Soon after my comment my telephone rang.  It was a concerned parent inquiring about her child's attendance.  As  I was speaking to her on the phone, I received a hug from my student and he left the classroom.

This student has missed many classes and had just recently come back to school for his "second chance".  What bothers me is that he comes to school but proceeds to waste time while in my class.  He does little to nothing outside of disrupt my class and bother my other students.  I ask myself how I could have reached him, but by the same token, my student needs to be focused when he comes to school.  He informed me that he wanted to go to college.  I asked him how he would go to college if he didn't even want to go to high school for free.  He just looked at me and said, "I don't know, Ms. Sample.  I don't know".

My quest is constantly to help the students that want to be helped and try to motivate those that seem to need a little nudge.  A lot of my students are beyond the traditional high school age, but not by much, however they still want someone else to do a lot of the work for them.  They just don't get it and I'm trying my hardest to help them get it.