And we're off!

I've started my prac early, and I love it! Really, I was terrified--insomnia, etc., but I got on with it and I absolutely love it. I have to put in a lot of time every day after school and early in the mornings to be ready, but it's worth it to feel semi-competent. I'm feeling confident and happy about teaching already, even though there are daily reality checks about what I need to work on.

Today it was a Year 12 student I'll call Nick. The word in the staff room is that his parents are forcing him to do Tertiary English, when he wants to do Accredited English. The head of English thinks he's strategically failing in order to prove that he's no good and should be allowed to do Accredited. I've overheard him bragging that his parents recently bought him a car, and also bribed him not to pierce his ears by buying him an iphone, even though he's literally failing in school and they know it. I listened to my mentor teacher on the phone with his mother last week, speaking frankly about his total lack of output and his rudeness to teachers. So today when students were working independently, I thought I would put in a real effort and stick with him for a while; I had some good questions that had worked well with other students, and knowing that Nick hadn't done much (if any) work on his big oral assessment, I tried to help him make a start and think through some of the issues he would have to deal with in the assignment. I got absolutely nowhere! "I don't know; I don't know; I don't know. I DON'T KNOW." Then lots of nasty looks and sarcasm. This happened several times over the lesson, and badly enough that I decided to give him a point in his planner, according to the school's discipline system, but he didn't have the planner with him, so that was useless. What's the point of little punitive marks in the planner anyway? He doesn't care about that. How do I avoid getting into a stupid power struggle with a student?  What's the real way to gain control of that situation?

On my ride home, I had Steve's voice in my head saying, "you don't have to understand everything about them," from the duck lecture. As a prac teacher, and probably a relief teacher too, there's very little you can possibly understand, so working with what emerges is really the only choice. It's an assets-based approach, more positive than thinking about what's lacking in the relationship with the student, desperately trying to fill in the blanks. I don't know what kind of learning style Nick has, or what his previous experiences with school have been, etc. But he's giving me the stink eye and saying "I don't know," and I have to figure out how to work with that.