In my worst class, today, three students had to do speeches. Despite sending messages to them via their homeroom teacher, most of them seem surprised about this.

Two of them had failed miserably and/or cheated during the actual speech day and were required to repeat their performances. Granted, they were supposed to have done this at lunch some time in the past week, but I’m not sure if the message was actually delivered or if they would have heeded it if it were.

The third was absent on speech day and was given extra time to practice.

The first two started practicing right away. One of them, student A, then decided to take a 15 minute break to “wash his hands”. I suspect that he was hoping that I’d somehow forget that he was supposed to do his speech. When I didn’t, he seemed annoyed but he did manage to get through his speech. (I had them face me, not the class, so there was no way for them to get help.)

The second student, let’s call him B, had one of the best speeches in the class. He’d met and exceeded the assignment and, if he hadn’t cheated, would have been finished. Today, though, he did a kind of triage on his speech by cutting out almost half of it. I am now faced with a dilemma. Do I send him on to the school speech contest but tell him to use the long speech, or do I send someone else? Either way, he failed the speech, but he doesn’t know that yet.

The third guy, let’s call him Mr. Absent, didn’t understand why he had to do his speech. I reminded him about his absence and he kind of nodded in a teenaged “yes, I notice there are words coming out of your mouth” sort of way but it was clear he didn’t understand how his absence hadn’t absolved him of the need to do his speech. He started talking to his friend. I eventually called him up and he acted angry. He then couldn’t get through the first two sentences of his speech. I made him sit down and memorize it and he eventually got through it.

I’m glad to be done with that part of the speeches, especially with that class. I’m still not sure it was worth the energy.