100 mg of Inspirational Discourse, Stat!

I have a growing desire to engage in educational triage. I think this is a bad idea but it is, nonetheless, becoming a greater part of my inner dialog.

There are "expectant" students and students who need no educational attention whatsoever. As they pass through the classroom door each period, their faces and names evoke an instant and uncontrollable sorting response: no aid required, worth helping, possibly redeemable, no hope. This response requires an immediate and conscious effort to stop it from manifesting itself in my actions. Greeting my good students is easy, I am happy to see them. Greeting my sad, quiet students is also easy, I want them to know I am glad to see them and they are safe in my classroom. Greeting my disruptive students or those who seem to revel in their failure is far more difficult.

I also find it hard to focus just as diligently on teaching what I can to the do-nothings and loud-mouths who crow their straight-"F" status and snigger when I ask the class for essay topics. Like the daily greeting, addressing these students in a positive, academically helpful manner requires all my professionalism and integrity. Sometimes I am certain they will end up like the kids in that Rush song I'm sure you all know:

Louts swagger out of the schoolyard/waiting for the world's applause/rebels without a conscience/martyrs without a cause.

So, are these students really lost? Is there some way to reach them?

Maybe not, and possibly. I think maybe I even have the answer of how to reach them, or at least an answer that works for me. It doesn't involve the latest pedagogical wonder-drug or slick set of laminated posters. It doesn’t involve one set of worksheets over another. It doesn't involve teaching one novel over another. It doesn't involve lock-step, standardized practices across the department. It involves involvement: constant, repeated, and unrelenting care, honesty, and a commitment to high standards for myself and for my students.

It requires excitement, enthusiasm and inspiration. It requires that students know someone wants to inspire them, even if they reject that inspiration now.

It also requires an understanding that I may not be the teacher who makes a noticeable difference.

Real changes happen over time under the constant application of treatment: slow and steady. One must approach this job understanding it is far more difficult to build than it is to destroy. In an emergency room, medical workers can watch a life run out in minutes, a life that took years to craft, for better or worse. In the classroom, a teacher can choose to work on what appears to be a sick, potentially terminal patient or she or he can elect to give it another try to revive that life, to inject that little bit of inspiration even if it goes unnoticed and unrewarded. Perhaps, in a few years, a healthy young man or woman will walk back through the door and say, "Thanks man, for not treating me like a loser. It made all the difference."

Even if he or she doesn't, what can it hurt to try?