In Mr. Homan’s explore hour he has a class of average or slightly above average readers.  They’re in here because they don’t excel at reading, but they don’t need any particular help.  In this class there is a particular student who threw a fit because she wanted to be in AVID.  It was the first day of the new quarter, and this was her first day in the class, and she said over and over that ‘I hate reading.  It’s boring.  There ain’t nothing I like to read.’  She instead wanted to do math.

The project today was to find a news article from the website newsela.com, and take the quiz associated with it.  This particular student decided she was going to get her class changed to a math one, so she didn’t want to participate.  Despite Mr. Homan’s insistence that no, you can’t change your class, and yes, you’re stuck here all quarter, I think she firmly believed if she made the class miserable enough for Mr. Homan he would let her change.  She spent 20 minutes complaining about not having a computer login.  Once Mr. Homan dealt with that, she took another 20 minutes to get to the website.  She then decided there was nothing on there that interested her, despite there being thousands of articles and she just had to pick one.

Mr. Homan stood his ground and was very patient with her for the entire class, but also very firm about what his expectations were.  Unfortunately, I won’t be able to see the rest of the quarter to find out if Mr. Homan was able to motivate her or not.  Nevertheless, I found the whole situation unnerving.  I can deal with students not caring, or with class disruptions or struggling students, but I don’t know if I’d be able to deal with a student who just refused to do anything.  This student wasn’t even being a distraction, she just flat out refused everything.  Logical argument, asking nicely, threats to call home,  all got the same blank stared response.  I don’t know what I would have done in that situation.