Teacher learns a lesson By GJ

Tommy was high on my short list. “What list,” you ask? The list of freshmen whom I wondered how to motivate. He was a little overweight, maybe big for his age. Tommy sat in the fifth row of the lecture hall that seated about 120 ninth grade English students. .

Whenever I talked to the boy, or tried to help him, all I got was a sort of polite resistance. He didn’t know why he was struggling, and seemed not to care much. His poor grades on homework, quizzes, or what-have-you didn’t seem to phase him. When I reminded him that doing poorly might result in having to repeat the course, he would just shrug his shoulders and say nothing.

This class was labeled “basic English,” and was theoretically made up of “slower” students. I was part of a team of four teachers who volunteered to teach this group. The 120-student size was only one of several of our options. If we wanted to deal with the whole 120 (for a quiz, test, film, etc.) all four of us were on hand to do so. If one of us wanted to do something different, he could take “his 30” to a regular classroom and this option was used more than the larger one.

One day, something happened and I don’t know what it was. It could have been a presentation of some sort by one of the other three teachers, or something Tommy happened to read in a text. Anyway, the class was using a “worksheet” of some sort, the kind where you fill in blanks when you see or hear key words. I happened to be doing monitor duty where I simply strolled around the room and looked at the worksheets over their shoulders. At times there were questions I might be able to answer, or at times I might need to prod someone to catch up.

As I stopped by Tommy’s seat on this momentous occasion, I saw him enter a correct answer to a question that was puzzling to other students around him. I said, “Good job, Tommy!” and patted him on the back. He straightened up in his chair, his shoulders stiffened a little, and I caught glimpse of a genuine smile.

From that day on, Tommy dropped off the short list and became a better student. I now knew what motivated him, and that was a simple word of praise. I had been familiar all my life with the expression, “pat on the back,” but I had never known it to work so well in the physical sense.