TheWRITEaddiction.com

So, here is another kid-centric, student-centric piece from me. I AM a teacher, of course, so many of my thoughts on a daily basis are about what else? Students! Now, this should be a pretty short post, but we’ll see.

As a teacher, my enemy is apathy. A student who does not care is a student who can not be reached. Now, my personal teaching philosophy is that all students can learn, and all students can be reached, so this presents an interesting battle when I see apathy in my classes. The sad thing is that I am seeing more and more students, capable, bright students, choose apathy over achievement. This is apathy that comes from many causes, but the one that irks me more than anything is apathy that is borne out of anger at high expectations. I’ve never seen more students in my lifetime choose to rail against expectations by doing nothing. The kicker is that these same students want to be successful in life, but only on their terms. In their minds, no outside factor bears considering. It is a selfish, self-serving mindset that can lead to utter destruction.

I have grown up with expectations, as I’m sure many of you have as well. What I have had to learn over time is to manage the expectations of others, and raise the expectations that I place on myself. For me, expectations keep me honest and responsible. I expect to be successful, so I strive to meet my Principal’s expectations of me by making sure that my personal expectations far outshoot her’s. However, I also understand that this generation considers things from other angles. For far too many of my students, it doesn’t matter what others think of them, and for anyone to try and juxtapose their lives with thoughts and fantasies of who they should be and how well they should do something well. It just make them angry enough to quit caring. What they are failing to realize, and what teachers all over the world are trying to impart into them, is that at some point in life, you will have to learn that nothing is accomplished for good when good people quit caring about themselves and others. Expectations are laced into the fabric of our society.

And what my students are not grasping yet, is that by choosing not to care about expectations; by choosing apathy, they are in a sense placing expectations upon others that their lives do not matter. I challenge my students everyday to be angry. To study angrily. To achieve angrily. To blast down walls of oppression angrily, but to also consider the fact that people expect things from them because they can do, and be, anything they wish. I challenge them daily to find ways of channeling the anger they feel at their parents and teachers, their isolation and societal groupings, their disappointments about their lives; to take that anger and instead of becoming apathetic, choose to CARE, and let that anger drive positive outcomes. I don’t expect all of my students to make A’s, but I do expect them to care enough about their own lives to make a difference in someone else’s. I expect them to make someone smile everyday. I expect them to be decent, out of the box thinkers who want this world to be about who we are, and not who we aren’t.

So, apathy, you and your angry malaise can take a bus to nowhere. I’m done with you.

~ J. Belt