Every week I look back at five things that one of my students made me go wow with either a change in behavior or doing something positive that is out of character for that student.
1. Major attitude change on the part of most difficult student!!!!!! 
He is doing the work I ask him to do, he isn’t being disrespectful to the adults or to attempting to bully (nearly as much) the other students and got to go to the gym with everyone on Friday afternoon!!!! I know that there will be bumps, but this does give me hope.
2. A student came up to me with a problem he was having with another teacher and we talked, I gave him the teacher’s perspective and we talked through it. He looked at me sheepishly and said that isn’t how I would have seen it, but I can understand why the teacher got mad at me now.
3. My non-reader student got mad at me when I told him to put his book away. I laughed and picked on him about it and then he started to laugh too when he realized what he had done. He is reading the Second Harry Potter book.
4. I was out sick on Thursday and the class that just started using the gym as a reward point system earned 6 points from the substitute. They told her about the point system and how they could earn or have points subtracted based on their behaviors. This is a block period that has a lunch period in between and the sub wrote about how great they were! You don’t realize how much you want your students to do well in front of the sub (especially when the sub was a high school teacher covering for you).
5. This one is a funny one, I was walking by a student and he was moving his chair around and somehow it came down on my foot. I yelled and hopped around for a little bit. This student is not known for his empathy when something happens to someone else, but he was all apologetic and came around 4 times that day and asked how my foot was. He joked around with me that he thought I was going to swear and holler at him for putting the chair on his foot. I asked him if he had meant to do it and told me now it was really an accident. I just told him then why should I get mad at him. He grinned a little bit and went to his next class. It was a different side of the student than I had seen in the past. It was the gray chair by the locker .
Those are some of the top things that happened in class this week. The young lady with the attendance issues before December break has continued her streak of coming to school everyday since the start of the new year, I if she makes it to school everyday next week, we are going to have a celebration in her honor. She asked for Chocolate chip cookies.
Has it all been a bed of roses this week – nope there were some negative behaviors, a couple of things that happened that were bad, some attendance issues from other students – the usual issues for the students I serve. Even with all that I am feeling better about my classes and hope that I am continuing to make a positive difference.
Remember – It is about the students not the adults, so do the right things for the right reasons.
Posted on February 6, 2010 by Harold Shaw
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