Before I start this rant, my freshmen were awesome. Really, really good. They are really getting in to what they are doing. More on that in a future post.
My seniors, however, are another story. We're doing pastorals and sonnets, which I realize are archaic and a little complicated. And some of them are a little boring. My goal here is to expose them to universal literary themes. These guys were struggling with the same things they are. Love lost, unrequited love, love, love, love. All you need is love.
In order to balance things out, the class sat in pairs. Hard literature is sometimes easier with a friend, I think. We started with a review of the pastorals we covered on Tuesday. They charted each of the shepherd's stanzas and then looked at the nymph's reply. There were a lot of light bulbs. The poems got the attention they deserved. No one was glossing anything over.
Then we moved into sonnets. A little background notes and then some translation. And this is where I lost them and my headache came back. There was talking and texting and daydreaming. There were very few giving me or the sonnets any attention at all. We got through one translation before everything fell apart and I gave up. Luckily, I did make it to the last ten minutes of class and pretty soon the announcements were on. Not much time wasted. Now they have a homework assignment over the weekend. And I still have a headache.
Once again, I'm left with the question, what in the world do I have to do in order to get these kids to pay attention? They don't want to do the work in class and they don't want to do the work outside of class and sometimes I swear they don't want to be taught. So I'm sending home six Fs next week on the report card. Six Fs. Seniors. They need this class to graduate. I think I care more than they do.
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