Umm, now I am going to piss you off

I have 2nd lunch which means I use the teacher next door's microwave to heat up my lunch. He has 1st lunch so he has a class when I go in his room to use the microwave. Today about 6 minutes in to 6th period, I walked down the stairs to go to the copy center. I saw one of his students walking down the stairs heading in the opposite direction of his classroom. This means the student was taking a double lunch. I asked him to stop and walk with me where I was going to escort him to class. No issues, no big deal, just walk him to class. He scoffed at me and after he finally started walking with me, he said that I was really starting to piss him off. I let it roll right off my shoulders. I told him he was making this a bigger deal than it had to be and he responded with, "Stop giving me sh!t!" Alright, now I am going to piss you off I thought to myself. I interrupted my neighbor's class on purpose (mostly to embarrass the kid) and told him I would take care of the referral to the Dean of Students. I marched back in to my room, grabbed a referral form and filled it out. I dropped it off with the Dean and went back to my lunch duties.

WHAT?! Stop giving him sh!t?! I was trying to help the little turkey! What a punk! This just makes me reflect on the attitude of the students at my school. Am I really teaching or am I babysitting? Lately I feel like I am babysitting. I sat in our Science Department meeting and found out that not ONE student in the entire district passed their AP exams last year. Not ONE! What does this say about our district? Our school? Our student population? Really?! Not ONE?! Where is the teaching going? I had the counselor say to me that the school system is 3 fold. 1 - teachers teach the lesson 2 - teachers provide an activity for the students to participate in to reinforce the lesson and 3 - students complete homework supporting the lesson. Right now, I am batting 2 out of 3. I teach the lesson, I give them a lab activity, and they don't do their homework. They don't even participate in the lab activity to accompany the lesson! Let alone their homework.

I have given my speech to the kids about "the U.S. is the ONLY country in the entire world to offer a free education to everyone. If you do not consider yourself lucky to be here, then stop coming." Now when I ask for the homework to be collected, I look at the 5 assignments that were turned in out of 29 and tell my kids, "alright, give yourselves the speech while I enter attendance." They know it by heart and yet I still have a horrendous homework rate. What is the deal? What are we doing? Our state is in a recession. We spend billions of dollars on education. Where is the student accountability? How is this fixed? How are we ever going to pull our society out of the working class mentality if we don't focus on education and student accountability?