This looks terrible, I know, but the genuine truth is that it happens at the beginning of nearly every quarter, nearly every year. We are about to start the third week of the third quarter. At the end of a quarter kids get used to the idea that no one assignment is going to have a huge impact on their grades. Then they forget how averages work and suddenly they’ve missed one assignment and bam all by itself they’re down to a D or an F, because there have only been two or three assignments that went into the grade book in week two of the quarter.

And one of the things people don’t realize about teaching is just how much acting is involved. Because I know exactly what’s going on here, and I know it’s going to get fixed, but did I begin every single non-Algebra class with a five-minute “Fix this or I will end you” lecture? One where I demonstrated that if I want to terrify my students my most effective tool is not to yell at them but, rather, to lower my voice? Did I use the word “pathetic” a whole lot more often on Friday than I usually do in a typical day, much less a typical week?(*) Yep. Sure did, to all those things, and not a single peep was uttered by 96% of my students (actually, let’s do the math, since I bounced three kids to the office during the lectures … ninety-eight percent) during any of it, because in stark contrast to most of my previous schools, very few of these kids have ever seen me genuinely pissed.

Which, uh, I wasn’t.

But I’m good at this, so believe me, they didn’t know.

I’d say a third of those kids got their grades up to passing during their math classes on Friday, and another third will be up to snuff by the end of the weekend. The rest will require some more individual work. But most of my classes this year haven’t had more than one or two kids failing, and I’ve seen more than one, miraculously, where at the end of the quarter every single student was passing. So they’ll fix it. And then fourth quarter I’ll have to scare the shit out of them all over again. 

(*) I have never described an individual student as “pathetic,” just for the record. I have used that word to describe specific work outputs, however, and I’m entirely comfortable with using it to describe the current grades of an entire class.