Well. We didn't even make it ten days, let alone until October.
Let's face it: I knew this was coming with this kid (the one I wrote about last week). When you have a student in your classroom who spends a significant portion of each year suspended, that student is bound to cause trouble in your room.
I was really hoping it wouldn't be inevitable though. I was hoping we could have a functional relationship, and he wouldn't add me to the list of teachers in Herbert High that he doesn't trust.
Unfortunately, I think that's what is about to happen.
On Friday afternoon, this student turned in an assignment asking him to assess the risks he had taken in high school. He made a choice, and wrote about the risks he takes when he speeds to work with a large amount of marijuana in the front seat of his car.
That puts me in a very difficult position.
By law, I am a mandatory reporter, which means that I am required to report when I learn that students engage in dangerous behavior or are put into dangerous situations.
By definition, driving over 100 mph (as he described) on a back road near my school is a dangerous activity, as is smoking marijuana. That means I have to tell someone or risk my position, and as a teacher-friend put it, "I am willing to sacrifice my life for my students, but not my job."
So I have to tell someone -- I have to send him to a counselor, to a principal, to someone better equipped to help him deal with all this than I am.
I just know that this is going to mess up whatever rapport this student and I are developing, potentially even destroy it.
This paragraph, despite being rife with dangerous situations for this student, is quite well done. The kid can code-switch; his entire paragraph is written in a voice more suited to text-messaging, despite his speaking abilities being quite possibly higher-level than most of his classmates. He also spends some time discussing how this moment offered an epiphany for him -- he realized he was, as he put it, "a total loser" in that moment due to his commission of several felonies. He recognizes what's happening here.
This all tells me that he has the ability to be a capable student, he's just choosing not to.
He's choosing to push the boundaries and see what happens. And while I can respect this, it also means he's a manipulative little snot.
I don't know what I would do, if I wasn't required by law to turn him in.
I'd want to talk to him about this epiphany -- this moment where he realized he fit his own definition of a loser. What was that like? What did it mean for him? Is it changing anything about him?
That could segue easily into a conversation about his future: where is he going? What is his plan, and how does this kind of thing factor in? What does he see changing with realizations like this?
But no matter how that plays out to me, it would have to include a conversation about why all these activities aren't good for his life, aren't safe, aren't the answer he's looking for.
This student needs boundaries, but the other way he can get them is if he pushes against whatever wall he finds. That's the only thing that tells him if it's truly a wall or just a piece of paper he can tear right through, weak and meaningless.
I want to give him boundaries, but I also want to give him someone he can trust.
And I'm not sure how to deal with that clash of purpose.
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