WHATEVA, TEACH There were about five minutes left in the ...
A, TEACH There were about five minutes left in the marking period. All I could do was sit at my desk, stare at the door and wait. At the end of every marking period, there are always students who show up with one or two missing assignments in the hopes of pushing their grade up into the passing range. Grade-grubbing at my school is not usually practiced by students hoping to raise a B to an A, or even a C to a B. It's only the students who are concerned with just barely passing.
The door flew open and in sauntered Madeira, a ninth-grader who honors the class with her presence two or three times a month. Her shoes were by Nike, her jacket was Rocawear and H.R. Giger apparently did the braids. She slammed an inch-thick stack of papers onto the desk in front of me.
"Here," she mumbled, as if I were already aggravating her.
"What's all this?"
"The work." She looked all around the room, because clearly the classroom setting alone was enough to confuse her.
"The 'work'? What work? I haven't seen you in weeks, and even then all you did was sleep and ask to use the bathroom."
"The work from the thing. The stuff for the grades " She trailed off, as if even finishing the sentence were more work than she was willing to put into this class. Perhaps she hoped that her eloquent usage of the words "thing" and "stuff" would demonstrate that she no longer needed my assistance in mastering the English language.
"This is all of the work from the marking period?"
I thumbed through the pages and saw that she had written no more than one sentence on each page. Each sentence consisted of no more than five to 10 wordstwo of which were her name.
"You expect me to read through all of this and factor it into your grade as if you'd been here the whole time?"
Her response may have been no more than a slide of her head and a snap of her gum, but it certainly spoke volumes.
"I'll tell you what. I can see you've put a lot of thought and care into this, and I'm pleasantly surprised. How about I just go ahead and change all of the zeroes I have for you in my grade book to check-minuses? Is that good?" As much as I try to look into the eyes of my students when I talk to them, with Madeira my attention was drawn only to her eyebrows, which I believe were drawn with a Sharpie.
"Whateva," she said, blowing a bubble and walking out of the room.
Yes, Madeira. Whateva, indeed.