Why I Passed Students That Probably Shouldn’t Have Passed
It’s a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation
“Ms. Smith, you’re the reason why I’m in summer school! You failed me!”
“No, you failed yourself.”
It was my first day of training as a teacher as a resident teacher for summer school. I had what was called a “cooperative teacher” (CT) or something like that, a mentor who actually oversaw my work in the classroom and gave feedback on how I could get better. I loved my CT and still keep in touch every once in a while,
However, 10 minutes after meeting her and introducing ourselves to each other, where she set her ground rules and expectations we had to enforce, a student came by the class and pointed at Ms. Smith. The conversation went as described earlier, and couldn’t have lasted more than 10 seconds. The student accused her of failing him and making him go to summer school. She did not flinch and had no change in her expression at all.
While I would have been very phased and felt a tremendous amount of guilt as a new teacher, she was completely unphased and treated it as just a daily occurrence and another day of the week when she told the student “you failed yourself.”
First, I wondered what I was getting myself into. It seemed like a very emotionally…
