One more week

Winter break is one loooong week away and it can't come soon enough. I'm currently trying in vain to get my choir ready for a concert on Tuesday. As always my major issue isn't so much students lack of ability (they're all actually very talented when they put forth the effort) but working through their attendance issues. I did progress reports last weekend for all of my classes and was actually shocked to discover that majority of my students are failing. Normally i would attribute this to my inabilities as a teacher, but after poring over all of my students records I found that the main reason for failing grades was lack of attendance. When a student is gone 8 out of 15 days yeah, they're going to fail.


Last year, being my first year, I was always concerned about how many failing students I had and was extremely caught up the way it made me look. But as the year went on and into this year I have realized that even trying my hardest, trying every teaching technique in the book, if the kids aren't there they're not going to learn and eventually won't pass.

I'm learning to take things in stride and adjust to the mindset that it's not always me as a teacher. Sometimes it really is the students and their work effort or lackthereof. I do hate though that out of a class of 15, 10 are failing, 1 has an A, two have D's and one just enrolled so they don't even have work in yet to actually grade.