After a pause, the child went on. “The kids who are really bad, the teacher is always working with them.”

Then the conclusion, as if formed in the speaking of it: “The really good kids and the really bad get all the attention.”

Back in the early 1990s, Ken Dryden, famous first as a hockey goaltender, then a writer and politician, squeezed his 6’4” self into the back of a high school classroom to watch what was happening there. One of the observations he put into a subsequent book, In school: our kids, our teachers, our classrooms, was that teachers do well teaching kids like them who want to learn, and not so well with the average kids, “the ones beyond the front row.”

I don’t think of my young informant as average or disinterested in learning. Still, in the overall scheme of things, average is probably a fair enough word. It’s where most of us sit. This child was telling me something similar, and something important, about kids in the middle, about that decent majority who can’t compete for the teacher’s attention against the dramatic or dynamic kids at the ends of the “good-bad” spectrum, but long for it nevertheless.

My sympathies are with teachers as much as students, to be sure, especially in consideration of their need to disperse themselves adequately among an entire class of students. But, may I put this out as a nearly-year-end reminder to notice also — as in give attention to — those in the middle?

Perhaps as teachers wind up the school year and reflect on parting encouragements to those talented kids who will blaze on into the next grade, or to those troublemakers into whom so much effort has gone (hopefully with some positive results), they will consider also some specific word of affirmation or extra minutes of attention for each child beyond the front row, beyond the principal’s office.

Thanks, on behalf of the twelve-year-old who first reminded me!

—-Photo credit: jdurham at morgueFile

tlsmediacenter – home via kwout

Media Center Home – takes you to the opening page of the wiki.   If you are viewing any other page in the wiki and want to return to the opening page, click on the Media Center Home menu option.  That’s it!  Pretty simple.

Our Classrooms - designed to take parents and students to essential school and classroom-related information. 

The “Edline” link (soon to be changed to “ParentWeb” or other appropriate name) will lead students and parents to everything contained in that resource:  news, grades, calendars, etc.  

The “Links & Project Showcase” page is new this year, combining two separate pages from last year.  The Links portion refers to sites identified by teachers and links for current classroom work.  The Project Showcase portion displays links to completed projects.  The page provides a one-stop display for each classroom (thanks to Jill for making this suggestion!).  Links to last year’s individual pages for these two areas are available in through an archive drop-down anchor, located at the top of the page. 

As far as layout and navigation, “Links & Project Showcase” retains its table style, as well as icons leading to Quia, Learning.com, Flickr, and SchootTube.  New this year are the classroom links index at the top of the page that will drop you down to your classroom section of the table (no more endless scrolling!), and jump up links located after each classroom section in the table to take you back to the classroom index.

I welcome your feedback on these changes.  Also, if you’d like to learn how to edit your section of the Links & Project Showcase, please let me know.  Dawn has already taken the plunge in this direction.  On the other hand, if you would like me to continue to add links, I will gladly do so.

Next up is Part 2:  ”All About Books”.