Absences

by Laura Brady

When we first started teaching our unit during full time, I was a little nervous and a little excited. I wasn’t sure how the students in our 6th grade special education class were going to react to having social studies lessons on Ancient Egypt every day. There are only six students in our class and our final culminating project was to have them write and publish a book with facts they learned from each of our lessons. They would keep an “Egypt Journal” and write at least three or four facts in it for each lesson we did. We thought this would be a relatively easy thing for the students to do with our help if they were able to attend and participate in most of the lessons. However, we seemed to have a problem with attendance during the two weeks. The first day of full time, there was a major rain/snow storm and three of the students were unable to make it to school. We had already scheduled to teach two lessons that day so that we would be able to fit everything in that we had to get completed. Our first two lessons were taught to only half the class. The second day was a little better but by the middle of the week, one of the students was sick and not doing much work in class, one student had been suspended and another had a breakdown in class and didn’t get much work done either. At the end of the week, only one student had been in class for all the lessons we had taught so far. Between our cooperating teacher having to get through what she needed to teach the students, and us trying to get through the rest of our lessons for the unit, there wasn’t much time to catch up the other students. We ended up taking time during the last two days to catch everyone up as much as we could, but some of them still did not finish their books by the final day. I was a little upset and disappointed that we couldn’t get more accomplished with the students. They were able to learn and retain a lot of information, which was so exciting. But it was hard not having all the students available for every lesson. Our cooperating teacher was helpful, but it makes me nervous about teaching my own class of 20 or more students. If you’re trying to teach an important unit, or prepare students for a test, how do you catch them up if they miss a lesson or two? You can’t take time away from teaching new lessons to the whole class just to review for a few students. But you don’t want to go ahead too far where the ones that were absent won’t be able to catch up. I guess it’s another one of those things that we’ll just have to learn with practice…