Classroom visit

Recently I visited my friend's hs classroom (thanks alice!).

My time and motivation is so limited recently. I'll try to cut this down to just the most important things. I have way too many posts left in Draft state.

Without people, there is no motivation. I'm just blogging to an empty audience.



1. In a typical high school class students operate at varying levels of learning efficiency, which fluctuates between 0 and 100 depending on their interest level. The classroom often feels like a sustainable, productive chaos that occasionally takes a step in the right direction.

This is likely due to it being more interesting, easier, and rewarding to chat to friends or do other activities.

The teacher helps a lot with this, and pushes the chaos into the right direction, occasionally silencing the class when productivity hits an all time low. Occasionally unblocking a student who cannot get into a working rhythm. Furthermore, the teacher talking to the student seems to provide some small motivation boost (i.e. the teacher's expectations of the student).

Productivity varies heavily between individual students. Some find it easy to concentrate and follow directions, others carry very little interest in the class and reach a high of perhaps 20% efficiency even after being prompted by the teacher. The content is not intrinsically interesting to some students.

Productivity is a lot lower when the exercises are too contrived and it's not clear why they're useful. For example, in the Chinese class the students were much more interested in learning to talk in Chinese (which is interesting and has obvious practical benefits and upsides) vs. writing a recount of their cultural heritage (which is intrinsically uninteresting and doesn't have applications in their own life).

The key, though, is that this is sustainable. Students mostly seem to go in and out of the class enjoying themselves and having a good balance of socialising and learning.

2. I also attended a lower tier class of students who did not wish to attend university and so took the English stream which did not count for university entrance marks. This class proved somewhat more of a conundrum for me.

The students were typically very disengaged, but very respectful. They were all very well behaved and nice people, and respected my presentation, but were not very curious about it. I imagine they had trouble connecting it with their daily lives.

These students were characterised by a lack of motivation and direction. Many of them had no idea what they wanted to do after high school, a lot came from households that did not care for them too much, and they did not see any reason to try too hard or pay too much attention in class.

Two boys really liked sports, especially AFL, and wanted to play sport professionally but imagined that they would end up being builders because that was the profession most secondary educated male students went into.

Two girls didn't have answers for pretty much anything. They remained neutral for the whole lesson.

One girl was interested in makeup and repairing cars.

One girl had a little trouble articulating ideas.
"What do you think an employer would look for in a candidate?"
"I don't know."
"What do you look for in people?"
"I don't know."
"What do you like about your friends?"
"I don't know."
"I guess, what's the difference between people you like and people you don't?"
"I like people that help me."

All of them pushed through quietly to complete the lesson, despite it seeming to have little relevance to their daily lives.

All of them looked like they had their spirits drained out of them.

This group proved the biggest conundrum to me. It's hard to relate, hard to understand, and I don't know how to help them, or if they would even want help. How do you teach someone who looks like they are a prisoner chained to the classroom?