That One Kid.

That one kid. That one kid is the one that drives me to get better. That one kid is the one who made me find a better way to grade. That one kid is the one that taught me to find a way to connect. That one kid is the one that is constantly driving me to find a better way to teach. That one kid every year that I can’t seem to reach is the reason why I am the teacher I am today, but even after 12 years I’m still a long ways from the teacher I want to be. In my third year of teaching, I had a student that was failing my class so bad that when he decided he wanted to improve he realized it was impossible. (I never liked traditional grading but I didn’t know how to do it any differently.) This student was the reason I pushed further into questions about why we grade the way we do. This push led to base 50%, then rubrics for assessments, and then full on standards based grading and a level of assessment that I could have never imagined possible. Today I only grade the standards and not a single piece of daily or practice work, and all of that was launched by that single frustrating moment. This mean that I have very few grades in the grade book but every grade is truly meaningful to me and to my students. I’m that one kid that got frustrated with work that was nonsense and just busy work, so I don’t give my students work to do just to keep them busy. We don’t do crosswords, or word searches, or coloring pages, we try to dig in every day and stay engaged. These changes are the easy ones, they just change the structure of what I do, most of it is done before it ever hits the students. The real struggle is that one student whom I can’t seem to connect the learning to in a way that results in better learning outcomes. These are often students that I connect with on a personal level, and they need that, but I still can’t change the outcome of their learning. These are often the students that don’t fit the traditional structured classroom, but yet there they are with no other options but me. Most of the time these students are somewhere on the ADHD spectrum, but sometimes they are not. It seems like every time I talk about this with others the common refrain is, “you can’t win them all,” but I have to refuse to accept this. If I believed that I couldn’t “win them all” then I’m accepting casualties and I refuse to do that. Every year it is these students that push me the most. I watch as many of these students slide along and keep aging up. Every year the teachers know that some day all of it will catch up to this student and they will find themselves a struggling adult as well. I just can’t in good conscience not try to do anything to change that trajectory. Here is the problem though. Every year they come through my class and leave with the same issues and the same struggles they came in and they did not make as much progress as I had hoped. Each year I try to wrap my head around personalizing learning for them, but each year I don’t quite figure out how to pull off what needs to happen. I get stuck trying to figure it out. I spend hours digging through the internet to find that breakthrough. I have begun to see that the solution might lie in a blended learning environment, but I struggle to find what this looks like in a traditional structured school and classroom. I struggle to see how to do this in an efficient way that doesn’t end up taking time away from my family in the evenings after I arrive home. I’m not sure where the solutions lie, but this particular issue has been one that continues to haunt my teaching brain. It seems like the issue lies in individual management of material and individualized grading, but I can’t find anyone out there doing this in a way that makes me go BAM! That’s it! Many days I ponder starting a new school where we can throw out the rules and make it work for that one kid. That one kid needs us to make a better school. That one kid needs us to “win them all,” because that one kid matters. If we can change the trajectory of life for that one kid, we can change the trajectory of life for them all. I have made many changes to my class that have opened the door for more and more students to be successful, but there is still that one kid.