March 22, 2011

The Spring Break Fade

“How many of your outlines contain deductive and inductive reasoning?” I asked my class today.

They’ve had three weeks to work on their persuasive speech topics and outlines. We’ve discussed types of reasoning and fallacies in reasoning for those three weeks. I’ve given them example after example. I’ve shown them example after example.

One hand went up, but it wasn’t because he had deductive reasoning in his outline.

“What’s deductive reasoning again?” he asked.

I had to take a deep breath. Nothing irritates me more than when I am crystal clear about what I’m looking for, I spend weeks teaching my butt off and explaining and re-explaining and then they just decide they’re going to ignore everything I’ve told them to do anyway. Most of the time I love teaching; but on days like today, when I feel like I’ve been talking to a concrete wall for weeks, I despise it.

So I went on one of my little tirades. Truth be told, I’ve usually had a tirade or four by this point in the semester. I should consider this a good sign. It took until the end of March for me to need to go ballistic. But the pregnancy hormones raged and I felt like my head was going to explode.

I threw the question back out at them to see if anyone had done the required reading, if anyone had been paying attention. One student raised his hand and told me the definition for inductive reasoning, not deductive reasoning. So I did what any good teacher would do. I tortured them with random topics and made them create a ready-to-go speech that was due. . . today. All speeches had to have both an example of deductive and inductive reasoning. By the end of the hour and 20 minutes, they had it down. And I was able to take a deep cleansing breath and get it out of my system.

These students are definitely showing signs of the spring break fade (with 4-8 inches of snow expected tomorrow); it’s not exactly spring. My senior has the worst case of senioritis I’ve ever seen, and my freshmen just want to go home. I think I’m going to have to start taking Hershey Kisses to class to throw at them and keep them on their toes. Chocolate is the only thing that works this time of the year.

Today, I am syndicated on BlogHer! If you missed it the first time around, go check it out here.