We just finished reading a short story in English 10 titled “Teenage Wasteland” by Anne Tyler. This is an interesting story about a high school boy who does not pass classes and who gets in trouble. The parents don’t know what to do with their son and feel like failures as parents. A psychologist recommends a tutor for the son to work with. This tutor has some interesting techniques and basically tells the parents to give the boy freedom. The boy eventually gets kicked out of school and runs away from home.
The story prompted conversations with my English 10 students about why some students have a hard time in school. I had the class imagine that they had a high school aged child who was failing classes. This was hard for some of them to imagineJ One of the students thought that he would probably be around 70 years old by the time he had a high school aged child. I asked them what advice they would give and they had a number of funny responses. One student said that he would just yell at his child to “do your work,” because that is what his father does to him. I asked the student if the yelling and lectures that he got, got him to do his work. He said “no, the lectures didn’t really work.” The students shared what “worked” for them and what didn’t really work. It was really interesting to hear students talk about this.
I told the class that teacher and parents want to see students be successful. I then shared with the class that occasionally both teachers and parents have no idea how to “reach” or motivate certain students. I have never really had a conversation like this with a group of sophomores before and I was pleased with how interested in topic the students were. The students were excited to share what advice they had been given before and were really interested in talking about this. Early on in “Teenage Wasteland” the parents are told to check in with their son every single night and to sit down and do his homework with him. The students came to the conclusion that the boy was not learning responsibility that way. The class wasn’t able to come to a conclusion about what the son really needed from his parents or teachers, but they did connect with the story and shared their thoughts that every student is different.
What a great conversation to have with your students. I have never read "Teenage Wasteland" but it sounds like it is a really pertinent story to the struggles that many of our students face with school.
ReplyDeleteI could see that being a great discussion with junior high advisory kids as well.
This is a great topic to discuss with your students. As teachers and parents we can't see into the students' minds and hearts. We might know they have a rough home life or some sort of disabilty but we still can't tell if the student is truely struggling academically because they don't understand, they aren't trying hard enough, if they've failed so much that it's just easier not to try or if school is not their top priority because of other factors in their live that we can't control. I think the most valuable thing we can do is to have those conversations and try to reach them as an individual.
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