3-2-1

3 things I have discovered as a student teacher:

1) Yes, students WILL sleep in my class, despite how undeniably fascinating Shakespeare (and similar subject matter) is to the average teenager.
2) No matter how fascinated I am with said subject matter, they will still sleep in my class.
3) As much energy as I put into sharing this fascination with words and language with my students, they will put the same amount of energy into, you guessed it, sleeping in my class.

2 things I find interesting about sleepers:

1) It's not a passive form of resistance. They have to actively block out my voice and all action around them to slip that far into a sleep-coma. Especially when I'm standing right beside their desk.
2) They seem to be able to get through a whole REM cycle while sitting in a horribly uncomfortable desk with a binder for a pillow. Frankly, it's kind of impressive. If only I could borrow that ability for long car rides and airplane flights.

1 question I have:

How do I rip the blanket of sleep off of my classroom and actively engage students in the subject matter?


Okay, so I'm not being entirely fair or accurate. The truth is, most of my students are awake and participating during class time. However, there are always those few that truly seem to believe that the purpose of 1st block is to catch up on sleep from the night before. Take today for instance. We had just finished watching movie clips from Macbeth and were moving on to read the play aloud. Not the most scintillating activity I admit, but better than listening to a recording. As we're reading through the play and chunking text, I make it a habit to wander around the classroom a bit in order to better supervise students. As I wandered back towards the front the noise got louder, and I realized what it was. One of my students was SNORING! Once I realized what was happening, I tried to surreptitiously ease over and wake her up. I stood by her desk, tapped her desk, no response. Her groupmates noticed what was going on and whispered to her, trying to wake her up, no response. By now, most of the students in the classroom knew something was going on. I generally feel uncomfortable (as a student teacher) tapping students on the shoulder to wake them up, but I tried that too, no response. By now I was out of ideas, and I swear, the snoring was getting louder. As my cooperating teacher walked over to see what was going on, the student finally woke up. I felt so incredibly inadequate as a teacher!

So, back to my original question. How do I encourage active participation in the classroom? I want class time to be a fun and engaging learning experience for my students, but how do I get through to those students who lay their head down as soon as they sit down and simply don't respond? I've tried incorporating more strategies into my lessons, especially strategies for during reading, which I think help a lot. However, there are still a few students who go straight back to sleep as soon as they find out whether it's for a grade or not.

I want to do better. I want to provide a better learning experience for all of my kids, and I want them all to gain as much from class time as possible. Not just an extra REM cycle.