#I've purchased a whole thanksgiving meal for a student who was food insecure

[blackcandlesinwinter]

Man, I usually have a ton of patience for my students but this one class really has got me on my last nerve. Y'all are mostly education majors. You of all people should expect to be engaging in active, involved, communal learning. You of all people should understand that your best learning comes through peer interaction and frequent reflection on and application of the information you are given. You of all people should understand that coming to a wrong conclusion is infinitely better than just shrugging your shoulders and saying "I dunno" and refusing to engage in the endeavor to reach a conclusion at all.

And I get that a lot of folks are new to this kind of learning and I expect to do a lot of hand-holding here while they figure it out. But Jesus Christ, at half-way through the semester, I'm having them pull up an activity on their computers to discuss with their tables like we do basically every single class. And when I go around a solid 1/3 of the class are just... doing something else on their computers and refusing to participate in discussion, causing the whole table to fall silent because there's not enough people engaged to get a conversation going. And when I say "we're working on X now, please pull up the document I provided" they do and then 2 minutes later, half of them have just closed it and are back to doing making a collage of wedding photos or whatever the fuck. After a second, more firm insistence, I still ended up with two students who just refused to participate.

Like... WHY ARE YOU HERE? YOU CAN JUST LEAVE. No one is holding you at gunpoint to be in my goddamn class! I don't even take attendance! If you don't give a shit about what we're doing, go away! You're ruining things for the rest of the students with your shitty attitude. GO THE FUCK AWAY and let the rest of the students actually participate! I'm THIS close to literally just kicking a few students out of the classroom.