Yeah wait this is a better version of the post. Though, I will say we are allowed to fail students and do, but you're looked down on if it's more than one or two students per class. When they test poorly that's also your fault even though you aren't allowed to offer any incentive and students are well aware that their scores have 0 bearing on their life.
(Sorry teacher rant incoming)
But to the subject at hand, tldr is that I tried.
I taught a certain classic every year. I tried hard to make it engaging and learnable. I had a poster board with crime scene map. We watched the movie along with it. We made connections to our life, comparing cultures. I had a "setting exploration station" day with snacks. I used reading strategies.
Problem 1 was that they refused to read at home. Problem 2 was that they have trained their brains against having an attention span.
It was a 12 hour book. That's a long time of just reading. So, I conditioned them to grow their attention spans by having regular amount of reading a day and then speeding up the reading track a little once they were getting it. I got students read-along adhd help bookmarks to help. It was experimental, I admit, when I upped the speed again because it was getting to the end of term and we were running out of time. But I asked several check for understanding questions, which my students answered accurately confidently. Those who got lost had the crime board and movie to help, which was better than telling them to read at home at moving on pretending they did (even my honors students wouldn't). And also, those who fell behind in the actual reading still were exposed to important literature. My goal also was because I noticed their reading scores were dropping due to focus, and so I hoped the reading and listening was to improve their that. Another of the issues I'd noticed is students lacking fluency. They would get stuck on words they don't know and quit reading right there. So, the speed focus was to help them build stamina to keep going even if they don't know every word or understand every sentence (a skill that got me through classics as a teen). It was rushed due to year-timing, so maybe it was a terrible plan, idk, I'm still researching, but it seemed to be working and the data seemed good.
We got through a classic with students able to answer deep questions about the book with references. And the overall reading scores when up for every class except my biggest, most discipline-challenged one.
But then there was problem 3. My principal came in during a tiny part of the reading that happened to be near the end of book and we were rushing to finish. Despite the fact that students answered every single one of my check for understanding questions accurately, I was chewed out for it. I explained my research and reasoning, but was still told I was a terrible teacher (again based on one short time they were in my classroom). Even with having an engaging activity as part of the lesson, the principal was hyperfixated on the fact that my students were reading too much.......in an English class. The evidence that my students weren't engaged? They weren't smiling and were staring at their books. Btws, every dang kid in that room had their book open, but no my lesson was too boring and utterly useless and I was a terrible teacher who had completely wasted my students' time in an irredeemable manner. My students needed to be jumping off tables with joy or else they couldn't possibly be learning. I wanted my kids to do hard things, but admin only wanted them to do hard things if they were exciting and colorful.
But at the same time, there was also a push to use the very boring and time consuming textbook that had quiz questions that even I didn't always guess right bc they were terribly written and showed no understanding of the book, which is another story. So even when I was colorfully "engaging" I was wrong.
In the end of the fiasco, felt pressured to never teach that book again and never challenge my students if I wanted a job.
I mentioned my worst class. It was over 30 kids after lunch. All the classes were like this, but I got the others into shape by this time of year. But this class was rude and full of students with neurodivergences and behavioral and home concerns that set each other off constantly. I taught an etiquette lesson once and these kids were actually surprised when I explained why certain behaviors were rude. They had "only person in the room" syndrome. Someone at home simply hadn't taught these kids how to exist in society. (Same person at home who wasn't helping them read is my guess). Trying to get them to read a classic with the constant complaints and angry comments and straight up swearing at me for making them read it was exhausting. One of my coworkers had been teaching for many years and confirmed that behavior is making teaching harder and harder every year. We live in an "Every thing goes" society where tiktok makes these students think that rules and being made to do hard things is some kind of oppression.
(Also admin was again unhelpful, the kind where if I sent a kid to the office it was my fault).
So yeah. After years of teaching an important classic, and each year getting harder, I gave up.
I moved to a school with waaaay better admin, but when my new team decided on a more contemporary book that better engaged the students' attention, I didn't fight it because I'm so so tired.
Anyway, like I said before. I'm trying. I'm trying to teach them to read. But gosh it gets harder every year. I still want to teach classics, but I'm not even sure how any more. I decided my PD research for next year is going to be about getting students to read. But there also isn't a lot of accurate research out there. A lot of it is elementary focused or requires time that doesn't exist in a high school setting or is testing the wrong thing that doesn't make sense in a modern classroom setting. But I'll keep looking. Students are also behind. There's all that research on how parents need to read to their kids, but the kids I get are largely the ones who never got that support. And then I have a few advanced ones that I have to also consider, and it is hard to differentiate between 30 different kid's learning levels.
I guess what I'm saying is, instead of being like, "Why don't you just do your job and teach" like consider...I'm trying bruh. I'm really really trying.
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