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The New School Year Brings Some Hard Questions With a Fresh New Start—and Definitive Answers

By Bill PagecloseAuthor: Bill Page Name: Bill Page
Site: http://www.teacherteacher.com/
About: About Bill Page ... Bill Page, a farm boy, graduated from a one-room school. He forged a career in the classroom teaching middle school “troublemakers.” For the past 26 years, in addition to his classroom duties, he has taught teachers across the nation to teach the lowest achieving students successfully with his proven premise, “Failure is the choice and fault of schools, not the students.” Bill Page is a classroom teacher. For 46 years, he has patrolled the halls, responded to the bells, and struggled with innovations. He has had his share of lunchroom duty, bus duty, and playground duty. For the past four years, Bill, who is now in his 50th year as a teacher, is also a full time writer. His book, At-Risk Students is available on Abebooks, Amazon, R.D. Dunn Publishing, and on Bill’s web site: http://www.teacherteacher.com/ In At-Risk Students, Page discusses problems facing failing students, “who can’t, don’t and won’t learn or cooperate.” “The solution,” he states, “is for teachers to recognize and accept student misbehavior as defense mechanisms used to hide embarrassment and incompetence, and to deal with causes rather than symptoms. By entering into a democratic, participatory relationship, where students assume responsibility for their own learning.” Through 30 vignettes, the book helps teachers see failing students through his eyes as a fellow teacher, whose classroom success with at-risk students made him a premier teacher-speaker in school districts across America.See Authors Posts (56)

And the Answers Are…Drum Roll, Please…

The answers to all of these thoughts, concerns, comments, and questions (including dozens of other queries about feelings, attitudes, motivation, and behavior) lie first in accepting two facts:

1. Students are not volunteers in the educative process. Attendance, school policies, curriculum, rules, and classroom procedures are mostly mandatory, unilateral, and predetermined independent of the student’s individual needs, interests, background, personality, experience, prior knowledge, style, and educational predisposition. Kids have no participation..

2. Teachers are volunteers. They are mature, educated adults, trained, knowledgeable, experienced, and credentialed, who chose to be there. They are professionals, contracted, salaried, and supervised. Teachers make many decisions and choices in their own classrooms. They have authority, responsibility, and support.

Additionally, the answers to the at-risk problems lie in understanding that this student-teacher relationship is not a fifty-fifty partnership. Teachers have the knowledge, ability, and the obligation to take the lion’s share of responsibility for successful achievement of all students. Students’ responsibility begins with attendance, compliance, and civility. Beyond those most basic requirements, their responsibility as involved, interested, participating learners is within the teachers’ power and influence. Whatever prerequisite knowledge, skills, disposition, socialization, and behavior are essential to learning the assigned material is the teachers’ responsibility.

The Simple Solution and Summation then Is This:

Since I, as the teacher, am responsible for making the decisions in my classroom, whether I have a good class or bad class is up to me and those decisions. Whether all kids learn, whether they relax, enjoy, and participate is within the moment-to-moment decisions I make each day. Whether my lessons, presentations, and evaluations are worthwhile or worthless depends on the choices I make continuously about each lesson and about each student. I have a choice of letting a kid sit and do nothing or I can get him or her out of the seat to help me and participate in some way. I have a choice of complaining because the kids wiggle and fidget or I can choose to get them all up tapping out cadence as they solve math problems. I have a choice of introducing music while the kids are writing. I can choose to use pairing and small groups to get the students more active and involved. I can differentiate my assignments, lessons, and evaluations. My choices are mine, not the students’. Whether students learn, achieve, and progress is my responsibility—that’s why I’m there.

With joy in sharing, Bill Page

Your comments and questions are welcome. mailto:billpage@bellsouth.net

My book: At-Risk Students: Feeling Their Pain, Understanding Their Plight, and Accepting Their Defensive Ploys has been revised, reedited, reformatted and extended. The book offers insight into troublemakers who can’t, won’t, or don’t even try to learn, cooperate, or behave.

Visit www.At-RiskStudents.com for a free monthly newsletter, a free 20-page article on strategies for teaching at-risk kids, and for a description of all 31 chapters of my newly revised, 2009, 2nd Edition, 280 page book—available at just $24.95 including postage.