What do you think about my student
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What do you think of your students?
I teach students in the 11–14-year-old range.
“They’re just kids” is one of my most frequent thoughts. I keep reminding myself that they don’t have the benefit of a fully-developed frontal cortex at this point in their lives, so I don’t really take anything they say or do personally. That applies for both positive and negative things. That student who thinks I’m awesome, and that other student who hates everything about me… they’re both still just kids.
Since they’re still just kids, I try to take every chance I get to help them grow/mature a little. Sometimes, that means pointing out their immature behaviors… holding up a mirror for them to see how their words and actions are perceived by those around them. Over the years, I’ve told several boys that they needed to “man up” for various reasons. It always works, too. Boys in that age range need to hear that more often, I think.
For example, I once overheard two boys complaining about a test that another teacher gave. The boys were making it personal… talking about the teacher (and not the test) in a negative way. So I stopped the class, asked the boys what they were talking about (which they admitted), and, in front of the rest of the class (it was all boys), I told them that they should “man up and quit talking about people behind their back… if they have something to say to a teacher, say it to their face.”
It was a form of “holding up the mirror” that those boys needed. I texted the other teacher and told him to ask those two students if they had something to say to him. When those students got to his class, he asked them, and they said what they had to say, and the teacher actually agreed. Well, agreed with the criticism of the test, at least. Not the personal stuff.
The boys even thanked me when they saw me later that day. They just needed someone to guide them a little into acting like an adult, I guess.