Why Nobody Was Learning Anything In My Class

I felt barely older than a high schooler myself when I started my job as a high school teacher. In fact, the first time I went through the cafeteria line at my school, the lady at the checkout didn’t give me a discount because she thought I was a student. I immediately resolved to start growing a beard.

What I realized shortly thereafter, however, was that I not only looked like a high schooler - in many ways, I was still acting like one too.

I found myself in a small classroom/office with 3 or 4 high schoolers per section in the special education program, and my job was to teach them executive functioning skills. The program was young - this was 2010, and programs like this had just started to spring up in private schools. These kids had various diagnoses - ADHD, dyslexia, dysgraphia - some struggled in reading, others in math. Most of them were pretty disorganized. Lots of missing homeworks, mediocre to low test grades - even with extra time, the “ability to type responses,” and other accommodations.

I was way over my head, and it didn’t take me long to realize it.

Many students with learning disabilities are extremely smart, but they get a reputation for, well.. Not being smart. Usually it wears away at them and they become discouraged, and eventually they believe it too. Sometimes they use it to their advantage. (Often, both).

One of my students asked me to look over his course selection sheet. I read out loud, “Austin, you’re signing up for… ‘African-Amerecian Literature’? You spelled ‘American’ wrong..”

“I know,” he replied. “But I want to be in the regular class, not the honors. I’m hoping that will.. ‘seal the deal’.”

“Adios, Señor Martel,” Des chimed in. 

“Des, there are still eight minutes in class,” I replied.

“Aw, man,” he shrugged. “I just want to go to Spanish so I can take a nap.”

I pinched the bridge of my nose in dismay. “I mean, a siesta,” Des added smugly.

Any shortcut that could be discovered would be taken full advantage of - be it with course selection, course work, or materials. I sometimes had them open their bookbags or binders, and what I found shoved in here, crammed in there, was essentially just the same principle manifest on a more local, visible scale: their interpretation of expediency. Handouts closed between the pages of a book, Bio notes scrawled on the back of a Math homework, a half-bag of Goldfish crammed in the pencil case - it's all the same thing; a shortcut. While their methods were suspect at best, their intuition was right: these kids were efficient, they were just too inexperienced to realize that in the long run, they were making things ultimately more difficult, and less efficient than they could conceptualize in the passing moment.

And what I realized at this early juncture of my career is that there needed to be an adult in the room. Imagine my chagrin as I looked around the room and saw that, horrifyingly - it needed to be me.

In a deeper sense, what I was intuiting was what these kids really lacked - they were myopic, shortsighted, they didn’t have a plan or know how to make one. And how could I give them any of that, if I was just as lost, confused, and listless as they were? I was 24 years old, and that is the exact time I started growing up. I remember walking back to my car to head home from school one day. When I opened the door, an empty Coke bottle fell out from my car floor, and rolled around on the blacktop. I hesitated for a few seconds before I bent over to pick it up, and in that moment, suddenly flashing before my eyes was the storm drain near the deck that I’d duct taped together; the antique speaker cab where I kept my off-season clothing; then my email inbox which had over 2,000 unread messages; the checkbook register that I vaguely remembered my parents telling me I needed to do something with; the desk drawer I had at home that contained my bank statements for the past - however many years I’d lived there. I was at best an impostor. Maybe a hypocrite. But all moral inauthenticity aside, I knew that at root, I was simply trying to give these kids something I plainly didn’t have.

I can hardly say now that I’ve mastered the art of organization or that I’ve become a beacon of perfection in executive functioning - but back in that freshman year as a teacher, I did resolve to grow, or at least improve, if for no other reason than to not feel like such a phony. I did go and replace that storm drain with a much sturdier PVC pipe, and bought a couple vacuum-seal bags for my off-season clothes. And I sold the antique record player (along with a bunch of other stuff my grandmom gave me but I thought was total junk) on Craigslist, and made a few hundred bucks. In the 15 years that have elapsed since these, my precious days as an inchoate young special educator, I’ve had 15 opportunities for New Years’ Resolutions, and have made countless vows, with ever increasing pluck, always with some degree of failure - but at the same time, always some growth, some improvement.

In order to improve a student’s executive functioning, you can force them to implement a new practice, like organizing their binder a certain way, or writing in a planner. But what you really need to do is sell them on the idea that the new habit or practice actually will be more efficient, make their lives easier, help them avoid the pits they keep falling into. If they see that you’re not just trying to make them take the scenic route over and over, but you’re actually trying to show them something that’s more direct, stable, sturdy, and sustainable, it is so much easier. You’ll feel a shift, like going from towing someone else’s car, to feeling their internal engines firing up, and the propulsion starting to come from them instead of you. You’ve shown them a new shortcut - and they are realizing that they were actually the ones taking the long route.