This week I returned to Meadow Valley Middle School* for the sixth time, and once again I worked one-on-one with sixth-grade student Lynn* in Ms. Smith’s* third hour math class. Ms. Smith asked us to work on some social studies work from the previous class that Lynn had not gotten anything done on. The assignment was a worksheet to be completed with one or two sentence answers that corresponded to a few pages in the text about the history of the Mayan people and culture. As soon as Lynn heard Ms. Smith ask me to help her with social studies, she began to act out in a way I had not observed before. She broke her pencil in half and called Ms. Smith a liar for saying she hadn’t gotten anything done. (Lynn had partially answered the first question.) After this we went into a separate classroom and Lynn continued to resist doing work. First she said that it’s boring, then she said that she shouldn’t be expected to do as much because she can’t read quickly enough. After that she told me that she didn’t know enough of the words and then, finally, Lynn said, “I know that I can’t do this assignment.” Lynn has never acted this way before, so at the end of our hour together my question was, why the change in behavior?
First of all, I think I would like to say what I don’t think caused Lynn’s behavior. When I talked to Ms. Smith after class, she said that Lynn is not doing the work because she is “just plain lazy” in general. This is not, in my opinion, and accurate description of what was going on, and furthermore I was taken back that a teacher would write a student off as an overall lazy person. Do students lack motivation sometimes? Yes, they definitely do, which is why Brophy and so many others write about motivating students. However, when we are usually working together Lynn gets a lot of work done even though she likes to talk as well, so I do not think the trait of laziness can always be applied to her.
This leads me to a first possible reason for Lynn’s behavior. When we are working together, we are usually doing math assignments, which I think Lynn prefers to social studies. Her preference of one subject over the other seems like it very likely could have caused her behavior. I have often seen the attitude of students flip-flop when they have to do a task they see as unpleasant, and Lynn did say that the work she was required to do was boring. This may be why she was lashing out and acting upset.
As second reason for Lynn’s behavior could be that she was using avoidance to keep from doing work that she has a low self-efficacy for. She spoke repeatedly about how she didn’t know how to do the work, and during our time together Lynn slouched, chatted, put her head down, wrote slowly, played with her pens, and a number of other things to avoid completing the worksheet. She also tried writing in really tiny print so that if her answers weren’t that good they would be virtually unreadable anyway. I tried to give Lynn a boost by showing her that the assignment really was possible for her to do, since the answers were all in the text, but this did not seem to help Lynn feel that she had the ability to do the work.
A third reason for Lynn’s behavior could have been that she was having what I guess I would call a bad day, but not in the sense of just a few bad things happening. Lynn is labeled as emotionally impaired, and this constant problem could have been having more of an influence on her behavior. While I can’t claim to have made any formal studies into the characteristics of emotionally impaired students, I have observed the behavior of several students in similar situations as Lynn, and I can say from experience that her emotional state seemed very off balance while we were working. This, of course, could be connected to another outside factor such as an event at school or at home that upset her, but when I asked her if something else was bothering her Lynn started talking about Ms. Smith being a liar again.
*These names have been changed.
