To pick one failure story is quite a task. I can think of countless times that I lost my cool in the classroom, said things I shouldn’t have said, gave up too soon, and didn’t hold up my end of the “bargain” with my students. What I want to focus on, and the thing that bothers me most, is the fact that there are students I let fall through the cracks. I like to think that I have a keen eye for everything that is going on in my classroom. I’m good at mediating fights, helping students who are struggling and ask for help, challenging the smartest and hardest-working students, getting students with disruptive behavior on task, and keeping the mood in my classroom one of hard work. However, there’s a certain sort of student that I just keep missing. The student I miss is well-behaved, quiet, and appears to be on-task. This student appears to work well in groups, and never asks me any questions about concepts, or asks to check his or her work against the answer key. This is not the student that I have to send away from my desk during a test because he or she really, really, really, just needs one quick reminder please, please, please! Sadly, at the end of the day, after all the chaos, if you asked me if this student was present in my third period class, I would have to think hard before I could give you an answer. Even more sad, is that this student is probably not getting most of the answers right, and will just barely pass my class, mostly by merit of completing all the work. In the middle of a long, often crazy day where I have to take care of any disciplinary issues, help the students who are constantly asking questions, and make sure my top test-performers are staying sharp, these students get forgotten. When I imagine their parents sending them to school, hoping to give them a good education, I become extremely sad and disappointed in myself. I am absolutely failing these students. They are well-behaved, perform in the lower 25% of my students, and absolutely need my help. There is no reason why I shouldn’t be able to assess every single student and provide feedback for them in a timely matter. However, no matter how many times I remind myself, they keep slipping through the cracks. It’s like that dream where it’s the end of the school year, you’re a student, and you realize that you’ve been missing a class all year long. Well, for me, it was the end of the school year, these students were barely passing my class, and I realized that I’ve been ignoring them all year. When I’m perfectly honest with myself, I realize that these students probably aren’t prepared for ninth grade math, and it’s 100% my fault.

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