Negativityisms

When it comes right down to it, I just hate being negative.

And I hate other people who are negative and bring me down. I work in an industry that requires its participants to be outgoing and outspoken and if one is not so then no amount of care, consideration and/or instruction will have any effect. Students who lack confidence, who are generally negative about their own ability to use English as a tool for communication, annoy me to no end.

"How can that be, Lance? Teachers aren't supposed to think like that!" some may say.

Well, maybe so, but these students pay their own way. They come here of their own volition (though possibly of their parent's volition, too). Why do they endure such torture every week, paying handsomely all the while? Why, indeed.

But it is this negativity that drives me up the wall. I have lost my patience with students who make no effort to make any progress. I dread their classes, knowing that they probably have some far-fetched idea that this one block of 60 minutes each week will magically transform their otherwise dense brain matter into a language learning device ripe for reprogramming, that stepping foot into this small office space will award them smooth acquisition of English.

The funny thing I noticed the other day, as I thought about these students and their rather hopeless situations, is that I have become negative, too. Their ignorant refusal to use in class the English they already know, to spend some time outside of class pursuing language opportunities, to engage in conversations longer than one syllable -- all of this has just pushed me over the edge.

I have simply run out of patience for these types of students. I suppose you could say I have been blessed with a very few number of honest-to-goodness students intent on learning and acquiring English. I can see Purpose in their twinkling eyes, can feel their growth in the conversations they have with me, can literally see their progress as they compose longer journal entries, read more complicated texts, maintain personal dictionaries. Indeed, it's these students that have turned me off from the rest.

But at the end of the day, I am still the teacher for ALL of my students, even the ones that should not be wasting their parents' hard earned money. Though despite my myriad efforts to motivate them and their equally countless ways in which they have managed to escape learning something, I am bound by my private little oath as an educator not to give up on them as long as they are willing to try.

But when do I know if they have given up? How do I know when they have succumbed to their own relentless negative growth?

When is enough enough?