Just when it seems like you’ve given it your all and no ones seems to be listening or watching…

Last week I was getting fed up with a tough cookie in my class, I’ll call Susie. This girl has convinced herself that she can’t and won’t put herself out there and try to learn. She has decided it is really not worth her time. After a number of attempts at getting Susie to see that she has potential and that it would be worth her time to invest herself in the learning process, I decided to pull out the big guns and call her mother. I was very nervous about this conversation – thinking that her mom would try to blame her daughter’s poor grades and even poorer attitude on the curriculum itself, or on me as a teacher.

This is not how the conversation went. The mother was entirely grateful for my time and concern for her daughter’s learning. She asked for my advice on what we could do together to get Susie to be more invested in the process. Susie just happens to be a basketball player and her mom had been at a game the previous night, she told me. She had found herself talking to other parents at the game that had students in this geometry course. She relayed to me that the conversations generally were saying “well, it seems like this curriculum is working.” I can’t tell you how happy I was to realize that this was the case. These were some of our toughest critics at the beginning of the year, and now half-way through, they were admitting that they saw their kids learning.

I am so impressed with my colleagues and my school for allowing us the faith and trust it took for us to embark on this project. Having the approval of the parents was never my hope or goal, or even care- however, the smile on my face may have proved otherwise.