You never know!

It's so easy to be negative about "unmotivated kids".  The ones that slouch in their seats in the last row and dare  you to teach them anything.  Yet, in many years of teaching, I've seen some surprising things.  I've learned that sometimes we do get through their armor of indifference even when we don't see anything happening.  I'd like to share a couple of anecdotes with you.

My first year in a French lycée I had a student who was failing and was indifferent and even aggressive in class.  A couple years later I noticed someone standing outside the school who looked vaguely familiar.  I smiled and he came up to me and told me his story.  He had dropped out of school but was now back and was proud to tell me that he was going to retake the baccalaureate exam and was dating one of my star students.  It took me a while to realize that he was the guy with the bleached mohawk, the one who had said he was going to kill me when he got a very low grade and whose mother was too busy to come in and talk to me. He was so pleased to see me and to let me know that he was now on the right track that you would have thought he and I had had a great relationship.

Just recently I went to Toulouse and took the subway with an American friend.  We were speaking in English and a man standing near me asked if I wasn't from Agen. He looked like he was in his early thirties and said he had been my student many years ago, adding that he doubted I remembered him because he had been very weak in English.  He has a lot less hair now, but when he talked about his class, a post-bac class doing mechanical engineering that could care less about English, I  remembered that it had been a "learning experience".  In those days I wasn't using TPRS and couldn't understand why they didn't know their irregular verbs. He did remember that I had invited a New Zealand rugby player to come in and talk to them.  

A few days later I received an e-mail from him.  He had called up the lycée and managed to convince a secretary to give him my address.  He asked if I would look over his English CV.  I agreed and discovered that he has traveled to Wales and to Australia in order to improve his English, which was quite adequate, and I found few corrections to make.  Later I received a nice thank you card in the mail.  

Neither of these boys learned much English from me.  I considered the one as an exceptionally hostile student and the other was part of a very difficult class, one of those classes that makes you wonder if you were cut out to be a teacher.  

If I'm honest, I have to admit that I failed with both of these boys. But what they have taught me, what lifts my heart and makes me smile, is that both of them went out of their way to let me know that they were more than the guy slouching in the back of the room with a scowl on his face, that they had grown up and learned a few lessons and there were no hard feelings.  So I tell myself that something must have gotten through.  And the next time I meet someone who just dares you to try to teach him something, I'll remember and be a little bit more patient, a little bit more aware of the nice guy hiding inside the tough guy shell.  You just never know.