A frustration and a success

I have told anyone and everyone who will listen about how wonderful my class is this year. I have an amazing number of dedicated, motivated, enthusiastic learners. We are having a lot of fun and doing a lot of learning. I wish I could take even a tiny bit of credit for the accomplishments of those individuals, but since they were just as wonderful last year, I don't feel I had much to do with it. If anything, I have spend more time telling these kiddos to relax and ease up on themselves. I had to have a long conversation with one little girl this afternoon explaining to her that four As and a B+ make for an admirable report card and that she didn't need to spend the whole evening crying about her failure to receive straight A+s. I especially feel her frustration, since she had 5 As before taking the rediculous district assessments. "A"s that she earned through hard work and dedication. Because of the "standardized" tests and the stress that goes along with them, she feels that she is a failure despite 12 weeks of amazing effort. Our final agreement was that we would ignore that B+ with the understanding that multiple choice tests like the ones we just took only tell me if they know how to take multiple choice tests. Since everything she did all trimester shows me that she knows how to learn and how to read, write, and figure math at an appropriate level, that is what we are going to focus on.

On a more positive note, I have one little guy who has been struggling for...well, basically forever. He has a challenging homelife, and his self-esteem is in the toilet. He used to sit in the back of my room and bang his head on the cabinets when he got frustrated by an assignment. Last week, I had to tell him that he was in danger of failing 5th grade. He had several Fs and his highest grade was a C-. I handed him a pack of assignments that had never been turned in (his biggest problem is not academic ability, but instead lack of confidence and a consequent refusal to even try) and told him that if he spent a week making academics his number one priority I thought he could bring all his grades up to at least passing. Although we have tried things like this in the past (always starting strong, but fading quickly), he put serious effort into it this time. He spent time before school and after school, during recess, and during lunch working on these assignments. He always chose to work in close proximity to me so he could ask for help when he needed it, but he did all of the work on his own. As of today, even with the district test scores, he had pulled every grade up to passing. Some of them are pretty close calls (60.9% close), but he is not failing anything. You should have seen the look on his face today when he realized that HE had managed to make such a difference. He was especially amazed at how relatively easy it had been. It wasn't the agonizing torture he thought it would be.

In a perfect world, he would realize that it made more sense for him to do the work when it was assigned, but I am not going to hold my breath for that. I would be happy if he just decided that he was, in fact, capable of succeeding when it came to 5th grade work. I know he can do it, and now (hopefully) he does too.