How to Deal with Students with Senioritis (When You Are Also a Student with Senioritis)

 How to Deal with Students with Senioritis (When You Are Also a Student with Senioritis)

            Wake up on the Monday morning of the last full week of student teaching, feeling groggy, cranky, and utterly exhausted despite the fact that you’ve just woken up from a full 10 hours of sleep. Lie in bed for ten or fifteen minutes longer than you really should, and then get up and frantically rush through your morning routine, scrapping steps as you go—steps that were easy to regularly follow at the beginning of the year but are not even fathomable now—like putting on makeup or packing a fresh and healthy lunch. Rush out the door and take your first deep breath of the day as you ride the elevator down to the parking lot, reminding yourself silently that there are only nine days of this left to go.

            Pull into the school parking lot at 7:38am. Prior to this month, the teacher lot would have been completely full this late in the morning. But in April, anything goes, and everyone is just trying to survive, so you’re in surprisingly good company being a teacher who waits until the last second to arrive at school.

            Throw your ridiculous mountain of stuff—your bag, kombucha, water bottle, lunch box, and laptop—on your desk and try to gain your composure and get organized before the first group of students come in. Take a deep breath and build the façade around you that you are cheery, highly motivated, and energized this morning. Ready yourself to convince masses of teenagers that doing work in class is worth it, and telling thirty different individual students that you’ll extend deadlines for them, and sign passes so they can come get one-on-one help with you even though you know they chose to be on their phones each of the hundred times you explained the assignment. Try to believe that they are doing their best even though you know you care more about them graduating than they do. Do everything you can to suppress the exhaustion and frustration you are feeling and continue to drag them to the finish line.

            Beeeeep! Sigh in relief as the bell rings at the end of 6^th hour, signaling the beginning of lunch. Bask in the knowledge that you’ll get the next forty-five minutes to yourself and your colleagues who sympathize with how you’re feeling. Click! Click! Creeeeek! Grimace, but not too visibly, as a student opens the door and comes in.

It’s Jaydon from 2^nd hour, who had an unexcused absence this morning for the third time in a row and wants to know “if we did anything.” You take time out of your sacred lunch to re-explain the assignment and answer all his questions. He asks you to check his grade and to help him with the assignment he could have gotten help with during class had he not been walking the halls aimlessly with his brother and girlfriend. You try your best to keep up your encouraging and supportive façade as you tell him he is still failing but that you’ll still accept five different assignments late if he can get them done this week. You smile as internally you dread his response, knowing he will ask for detailed help on each of these assignments, some of which were due eight weeks ago, and all of which have been explained over and over and over all semester. But you know he has a life, and that he is just experiencing senioritis, and that he really doesn’t mean to be a bother or to be disrespectful. So, you calmly help him through everything and work with him to create a plan to graduate.

You try desperately to keep your spirits up (or to at least convince students that your spirits are up) for the last two classes of the day. You spend the afternoon having to re-explain overdue assignments, repeat what your mentor teacher has already said six times for students who were not listening, and scrolling back to February in the grade book to enter scores for assignments that have just been turned in, about half of which end up having to be thrown out due to being plagiarized or copied from a peer.

The final bell rings and you pack your stuff up. You walk out to your car and start it, half-listening to NPR as Jedd Beaudoin gives his latest music review, decompressing from the day and realizing that you genuinely feel too tired to make the three-minute drive home.

You unlock your front door and drop your things on the chair as your puppy greets you excitedly. You take her outside to potty first thing before you sit down and risk feeling unable to get up. You bring her back up the elevator and then you lie in bed, turn on your comfort show, usually Gilmore Girls reruns you’ve seen hundreds of times, and fall asleep for a four-hour nap at 4:35pm, vaguely worried that it will make in harder to sleep tonight but confident that, like last week, the exhaustion in you runs so deep that you will still be out by 10:00, and unfortunately still feel tired in the morning.

Only 8 more days.