We do Students of the Month in my building, awarded … well, every month, as you might expect. Each teacher gets to name one every month, and there are no rules for who you choose to nominate, or at least none that have ever been presented to me. The kids get their picture taken for a trophy case in the hallway, a small assortment of goodies, and free admission to any sports or school activities for the following month. We got the email today to fill out our spot in the spreadsheet for March, and … damn, am I having a hard time picking a kid this month.

My usual rules, or at least guidelines:

• Someone I like (obviously);
• with good grades, or poor grades that have shown recent and notable improvement;
• not a behavior issue, or, again, a former behavior issue who has shown significant improvement;
• Good attendance;
• I try to pay attention to gender and racial diversity, but there aren’t, like, quotas;
• and — and this can be the hard one — has not been nominated before by another teacher.

It’s entertaining to wonder about what might happen– the answer is almost certainly “nothing,” but whatever– if I just nominated the same kid every month; I doubt anyone would say anything, but I like to pick less obvious kids, even if it occasionally leads to kids who are doing great in my room hassling me about how I haven’t chosen them yet. Generally that type of kid is willing to accept “I would, but you’ve already been nominated four times this year,” and if not I can always just tell them I don’t nominate anyone who asks.

But yeah. I don’t have any obvious choices this month, and a couple that might have been good choices earlier in the year have been on my nerves lately, and there’s one kid who I’d like to reward, because he has improved, but he’s still failing all of his classes– he’s just gone from scores in the zeroes and tens to high forties and low fifties, and I’m worried that if I nominate him he’ll immediately get himself suspended.

Which is a thing that happens, more often than is statistically reasonable. Not just with my kids, but with the whole list– I’m pretty sure I could get a decent office pool going each month betting on which two or three kids from the SotM list are going to be suspended within two days of getting the award. Which, by the way, cancels your free tickets, although you get to keep your pencils or whatever and we don’t scratch your face out of the picture.

Hell, that would be kind of hilarious. A big, theatrical X over the face of every kid who got suspended right after being named Student of the Month. Even better if we didn’t explain it, since the trophy case is literally right by the main door to the building. I’d love to see the parent looking at all those pictures and then realizing that 15% or so of them have their faces marked out. Maybe we’ll put a camera in there.

At any rate, I’ve got a tentative choice, and I’ve got until next Friday to decide, but it’s taken a lot of thinking for an honor that is not exactly going to change a kid’s life. Maybe I’ll take a look at the kids who won in August and add them back into the pool. True story: my original August choice got arrested the day before SotMs got announced and I had to switch her out on short notice. This genuinely is a thing, I swear.