Pinche Chiquita

[maestroloco]

Motivating factors are interesting. I have a girl who won't ever do anything in my class unless I lay down some sort of ultimatum. Today she walked in and proceeded to completely ignore my directions. It's not like I was asking her to do something complex or strenuous. I just wanted her to sit down and copy down some terms from the overhead, and then make a best-guess definition of each one. She's actually one of my smartest students when she applies herself. So she decided instead to pull out her raspberry lotion and begin to distribute it among the class, who to their credit had already begun the exercise. So I took the lotion and her purse away. She got pissed then. She put on an attitude and declared that until she got her purse back she wasn't going to do anything in my class. I told her that was fine, that she would get her purse back at the end of class whether she participated or not. So she swore a bit, and then sat and huffed a bit. I proceeded with the lesson. Soon (30 seconds later), she is bored and starts talking to the students next to her, distracting them from their work. So I told her that the choice to do nothing was fine for her, but it wasn't fair to distract the students who WERE trying to learn. She had three choices: Sit there, do nothing, and be quiet; Leave the classroom; or join the lesson. She responded with a roll of the eyes, and I told her that her eye rolling told me that she understood her choices. So I continued. Then she asked me if she could go see her folder teacher, that she wanted to change some classes. Not mine, she said, but some other classes. I told her that I would rather she sat there and absorbed some of what I was saying than go talk to her teacher, and that I'd let her go a little early if we finished a little early. So she sat for about 1 minute more, and then decided that it was more interesting to be part of the conversation than to just sit back and watch it, pulled out some paper, and joined the class. All of this occurred in the time frame of about 5 minutes.

I ended up giving her purse back about halfway through the lesson, and she helped the lesson finish a bit early and was able to talk to her folder teacher. Everyone won today. I wish she would realize that sometime and quit being such a little shit. :)