Goals

I had an interesting conversation with one of my advisory students today. At the beginning of the year she was in my French class and was excited to learn because their family was planning a trip to Paris for the spring. Her 7th grade year she was always on the honor roll and kept up in all her classes, but 8th grade brought on some new challenges. She started hanging out with the wrong crowd (a group of druggie punk kids), started getting involved with boys, and neglected her schoolwork completely. She dropped my French class because it was too difficult, and her grades for all her classes went down the tube. She went from having a 3.5 GPA all last year to struggling to keep above a 1.0 GPA. Her mom is not happy, my student is often grounded, and the Paris trip was canceled.

Today we were talking about her grades. We came up with some goals for her to work towards for next year. She wants her grades to be back up to a 3.5 GPA, especially since 9th grade actually counts. She wants to be able to get into a good college. She wants to become a teacher one day so that she can help kids who are struggling like she is right now. One of her biggest reasons she wants to be a teacher is to show kids that learning can be fun. She says that none of her teachers act like they even like their jobs or their students. It really is true--the attitude the teacher has often rubs off on the students. I try to show my students how passionate I am about French. I smile, and laugh, and I try to have fun with them to teach them that learning is fun. I told this to my student I was talking with, and she said that she wished more teachers were like that.

As we were talking, the bell rang, she thanked me for talking with her. She told me that she really has appreciated me being her FROG teacher this year (that's what we call our advisory class: Fully Realizing Our Greatness). I believe that she can reach her goals for next year. I sincerely hope she does. I'll probably never know if she'll make it to college, but at least I have tried to point her in the right direction.