You’re sitting in class. The lesson makes no sense. You’re behind and everyone around you seems to get it. So what do you do?
You have three options:
• Try and fail publicly.
• Check out quietly.
• Act out, and take back some sense of control.
Most choose option three.
After the outburst, they get a
or a restorative discipline conference. Then they go back to the same classroom, with the same gaps, listening to the same lesson. It’s almost like we believe exposure to instruction is the same as learning. You cannot learn fractions if you have never mastered multiplication. The gaps don’t disappear because a student sat through class.
So what happens next? They fail?
Of course not. Because if they fail, they might drop out. And if they drop out, the school loses funding. So the student shows up to tutorials, checks some boxes, and gets a 70. Or they are enrolled in a multiple choice digital course recovery option where they can guess their way through for full credit. Then they advance to the next grade, where the next teacher is expected to catch them up. Spoiler alert: they never catch up. This is how you graduate someone who cannot read.