That Disruptive Student...

That disruptive student I wrote about back in February is a lot less disruptive these days. For the wrong reasons though. Before, he would attend nearly every class although he'd be occasionally tardy. Now there are lots of days when he simply doesn't show up. When he is in class, we've managed to have some productive talks where he could at least explain to me his situation. His basic reasoning for not doing any work in class is that he has to take English in summer school anyway, so he believes it doesn't matter what he does in this last quarter. He actually told me that he wouldn't do any work, but he would "just be quiet" in class. He has managed to drastically improve his classroom behavior, but I feel like there are other factors outside of school that have caused him to be quiet and keep his head down during class.

I asked him to turn in any kind of writing sample to me, and he turned in a story about the carbon cycle that he wrote for a science class. Although his mechanics weren't as polished as other students' writing, he did experiment with complex sentence structures, used dialogue in his story, and showed flashes of being really descriptive. The next day in class I gave him an individualized grammar assignment to work on, and he completed it. I'm starting to see that the more individualized assignments I give to him with his name written on top of the page, the more likely he is to do work.

One day he was willing to participate in a vocabulary drama activity in which he acted out a skit representing the word "effervescent." He was a natural in front of the class, and the class seemed to pay closer attention to his performance. He even shouted out some guesses to other students' skits although he guessed random words that were not on our vocabulary list. I'm going to try to find more ways of getting him engaged in activities like this, perhaps some role playing based on scenes from the book we're reading, Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. There are four weeks left, and I really need to get more creative at getting this student to "be a student." He recently told me that he passed the Exit Exam already and I've seen his writing, so he can't lie and say that he doesn't have the skills. It's just about motivating him to do work.