All my students were pretty much brain dead today, but it wasn’t actually my fault. That said, my brain wasn’t much better.

The school where I work is strange in May. There are lots of school trips and lots of disrupted schedules and lots of partial days. During mid-term exams we focus on our final exams and making lesson plans for the final push whilst everyone else is administering and marking exams and they don’t care about anything else. To give an example of what happens, on the day before exams I told one of my homeroom  teachers I had a junior high student who was sitting back, doing nothing and daring me to make him work with a “whatta ya gonna do aboudit?” smirk. The homeroom teacher’s reaction to this news was one part “why is this my problem?”, one part “why are you telling me this now?”, and one part “yeah, how about that.”

(For the record: now that mid-terms are over and I can keep students after school, my student’s about to discover what I’m gonna do aboudit.)

The final push, as I’ve mentioned before, is June. We’ve been at school since early April but still have about half our classes to go because of the strange schedule.

Today, though, was especially strange as it fell after two days of mid-term exams. To a student, in three different grades, the students’ attitude was “Whoa? You’re still here?” and “Why the hell are you making us do stuff?”

I had students sleeping; students pretending to use their phones as dictionaries whilst “secretly” texting; a student who walked in with a smile but no text, no pencil and no paper; students who didn’t bother to bring the handout; students who ignored me when I called on them because they weren’t ready; students who did the wrong assignment when it was their turn to speak and had to do it again.

Granted, they are coming down after an intense couple days, but my class doesn’t have mid-terms exams which means, quite frankly, I don’t care about their previous problems.

June is coming and things are about to change. If they think this ends happily, they haven’t been paying attention.