>I do my best. I have a quote near my desk reminding me not to let that which I cannot control affect that which I can. What about those items that seem to be under my control, but keep happening? Every teacher has them: the pet peeves.
1. Perfectly good pencils left behind on the floor at the end of a day. This student will probably complain tomorrow that he has no pencils, and therefore cannot do his math. Grrrrrr!
2. Paper, recyclable paper, in the wastebasket – when the recycling bin is right next to it! I worry that we’re raising a generation of kids for whom recycling is a “yeah, yeah, yeah, okay” instead of a useful and valuable action.
3. Violins left at school all week. This is twofold: the violins get in my way, like the one right under my chair legs. More important, the students aren’t practicing. If they only play the instrument once a week, they’ll make no progress. It’s a lot like learning math or reading: practicing the skills is essential to maintaining knowledge and making progress. Okay, readers, spill it. What are your pet peeves, teacher or not?
>My teacher pet peeves: parents who bail out their kids from any kind of failure, administrators who waste my time with meetings, students who don't uphold their end of the bargain–that is LEARN what I'm teaching, lawmakers who dictate my job without providing adequate funding to meet their demands.
>Spencer was grumbling that the school charges students $5 to get their instrument back if they leave it somewhere at school rather than putting it in their locker or taking it home. He was saying how unfair it is and I just laughed . . .
>Enabling parents, apathetic administration, the almighty paperwork so entwined in my special ed. profession, lack of communication amongst staff about activities I should be prepared for, and, like you, the pencils on the floor and, around here, in the hallway. I can walk down the hallway at the end of the day and find perfectly good pens and pencils that have been dropped and forgotten.
I couldn't agree more about the recycling becoming a passe thing. I hope my own children are more concientious (surely i misspelled that) at school about it.
>I teach at the graduate level. Here are mine:
Students that want to be spoon fed everything.
Students that complain that getting a lecture on something was too boring. When you present similar material in another, more participatory fashion, they then complain it's too hard.
Lack of ownership of their own education-don't want to attend the "extra" sessions you schedule, because they happen to be at "inconvenient" times, and aren't required. But then they grouse about the lack of experience in precisely the thing you ran extra sessions on.
Joe