Coloring Pictures for Christmas

　　It was the second quarter of the year. Meaning we were past half way through with the entire year. By this time, Ms. S's class was one of two things, a class to get homework from other classes done, or a good forty-five minutes of sleep.

　　Let me tell you, it's true. I rarely ever work as hard as I can on anything, studying happens few and far between, projects are done as late as possible, all the stuff I do is squeezed out of my "pressure quality" box, which ensures that everything I do is done fast and well. Ms. S's class was the perfect place to sharpen this skill of mine. All her assignments were slapped together at the last minute, sometimes in the class before hand or the break between classes. Once done, they looked like I actually worked on them and I got off with the highest grade in the class.

　　Anyway, third period science was a study hall/45 minute recess for everyone. Now, there had to be something reflecting this slacking off, right? There was. No one cared about Ms. S's class. I mean no one! The homework wasn't done and the tests were failed, every day. No one cared. Now here's the unbelievable part of the story. There were 24 students in that class. 22 were failing the class. Listen again. Twenty-four total students, 2 were passing, the rest were failing. For the first 6 weeks of the 9-week quarters, the class average was a 24%. Yes, out of a 100%. That meant that all of our grades averaged together totaled 24%.

　　We had guys in there strolling happily along averaging a 10%. This meant that they were alive and showed up to class and nothing more.

　　A monkey could get higher than 10% in her class, but it was all a matter of whether the monkey wanted to or not. And these "monkeys" didn't.

　　During my study of Chinese with my dad, I have come to realize a very important lesson. He made me read these little folk tales to learn words. One of the folk tales involved an old man and monkeys (how ironic). The old man raised a bunch of monkeys and one day he said, "I am limiting your food supply to three pieces of food in the morning and four at night." The monkeys were furious! They yelled and screamed. Until the old man finally said, "Ok, Ok. I'll give you 4 in the morning and 3 at night." The monkeys screamed with delight and agreed. The moral of this story is to focus on the big picture and not what is sitting in front of you.

　　The point is, I was looking at the big picture. Sure I could have slacked off and not done any of the work, but what college would accept someone who had gotten a 10% in one of his classes? So I kept my grade up there at a nice even 98%. Guess what? Remember I said there were two passing? Matt had the other 98%. Great laughs for us, even today.

　　What you just read is definitely not the punch line of the joke, it gets better.Ms. S had to do something about these grades. What would you do if you were a teacher? Your students don't give a care in the world as to what their grade is. They aren't doing homework and failing the tests on purpose. Steve even took a test in multi-colored crayon once, because he ran out of pencils he said.What would you do? Take a moment and think about it. There are a couple things Ms. S could have done.

　　One. Sit down with her students and discuss with them what she is doing wrong and change her style of teaching. That would have been the best approach. Two. Show the students what Matt and I saw, that this would hurt you in the long run. This is also a very viable solution.Three. Try to get the kids interested in the projects and labs by making them more exciting at the cost of information. A solution that might or might not work, but still could be done, but at that point in the year it couldn't hurt to try.

　　Four. Figure out some way to make students care about your class again, through incentives such as free days, movie days, fun days. This would turn your class's attention, but you wouldn't be teaching much. Still she wasn't teaching anything at that point. So all four of those would work and probably would have worked.

　　What did you choose? Did you think of any better ones?

　　Let's see what Ms. S chose. I can promise you that it will be different from both of our choices.

　　A couple days before Christmas vacation, Ms. S walked in one day with a HUGE stack of papers. This was a good 10 pounds of packets. Each of these packets had at least 20 pages in them. These packets were quite a bit heavier and more voluminous than most of our final exams are.

　　She passes them out and the kids start laughing immediately. You know what was in the packets? Coloring book pictures. They were filled front to back with 50 pages of pictures from coloring books. She got out the class set of markers that were supposed to be used to draw charts for physics and chemistry and said, "Color. Each page is worth a point. The more you color the more points you get. This is my Christmas gift to you."

　　This once again turnssintosthe story of "The Old Man and the Monkeys", Ms. S threw this little treat to all the students and they jump all over it. So the kids start to color and after about a week, kids with 30% or 40% were passing, kids who had 60% had a C, and those whoswheresjust around 70% got B's. Matt and I were incredibly angry at this point. Why the hell should we work through out the entire year to keep our 98% and the other students get the same grades for coloring a packet?swhereswere we? Wonderland!? Was that her wonderful panacea of a solution to the problem? That packet counted more than all the tests, homework, projects, and class work of the entire quarter. If you had missed everything that quarter, came in and did the packet, you would be passing. All our hard work had just gone down the drain. Justice and fairness were nowhere to be seen.