The Sleeping Student

On Fridays, I get to stay at Farragut all day long. Since I only observe 4th block twice a week, the class isn't really my own. This past Friday, there was a student sleeping in class. My teacher asked me if I would review a single homework problem while she pulled her in the hallway to talk. Not knowing the entire situation, I felt that it was odd to do something so drastic just because a student was sleeping in class when usually she merely asks them to wake up. Nonetheless, I got up and reviewed the problem with them.

I asked the class if they had any other questions. At first they said no but after prompting them they finally asked if we could do another problem. When that was done, I told the class to sit patiently while I looked for my teacher in the hallway. I wanted to make sure everything was okay since my teacher had only asked me to do one problem. When I peeked into the hallway, both my teacher and the student were gone. I didn't enter panic mode, but I was concerned.

I walked back into the classroom and told the class to please keep the noise down as I went to ask another teacher if they knew where Mrs. Wolfe had gone. Turns out, no one knew.

So I grabbed the packets that we had planned to do and asked the students to work on the warm-up. Since this class was ahead of schedule, I didn't know how my teacher wanted to introduce the section. If it had been anything BUT word problems, I would have felt comfortable moving ahead. However, since word problems are the nemesis of the students, I knew that having me try to teach them on a Friday would surely lead to bad news. I also felt uncomfortable since I was not used to the students and vice versa. Just going over the few homework problems had raised issues with trying to get them to listen to me and I knew the last thing that they wanted to do was learn more.

So we waited.

I know this might not have been the most professional thing but it was the solution that worked best. After a total of 20 minutes or so, Mrs. Wolfe returned. She was surprised that I had given them the packets and had them do the warm-up but was happy. We picked up the lesson for the last 15 minutes of class and chalked it up to an interesting period.

What had happened is the student who was sleeping had a rather interesting past. Turns out her biological parents had some issues (her dad was shot in front of her when she was 5 and her mom was addicted to drugs). After being tossed around various foster families, doing drugs herself in middle school, and being taken to countless psychologists who had less-than-clean reputations, her life was a little chaotic. My teacher had decided to take her to the guidance counselor to discuss things however she had left for the day and thus they were left to talk to the school psychologist. My teacher felt it was necessary to be in the room with the student given her past, however she did confess that the whole time she was concerned I thought she had abandoned me (which I didn't).

At the end of the day, we talked about how the math might not stick with the students but at least we can be there for them in other ways. Since this block had been ahead, it was okay that we had a bit of a slow day.

The situation was a good reminder that we don't always know what's going on with the kids. Just because someone is sleeping in class doesn't mean we should get angry with them and penalize them for having a difficult home life. This doesn't mean that we need to give students a free pass all the time because they still need to be accountable for their academic work but we always need to be compassionate to the needs of our students.

We ended the week with my teacher telling me a story from when she taught at South Doyle. There was another cronic sleeper in her class and one day she finally decided to try and wake him up. As she walked over to him, all the students told her not to do it. Turns out the kid had to sleep on the front porch every night and often times people would beat him up in the middle of the night. Because of this, if anyone ever woke the kid up, the would wake up throwing punches.

It's a tragic situation that no student should ever have to be in and yet that's what some of our kids are dealing with. I've learned that we need to invest in our students and really get to know them so that we best know how to teach them. Maybe sometimes this means letting them turn in their homework a day late with no penalties (if maybe they had to take their kid to the ER last night) or sleeping a little bit (since they had been up all night dealing with some family issue). Whatever the matter, we need to be compassionate and loving to all of our students because they might not be getting it at home.