Reply to Chronic absenteeism and truancy in DC

Forum Index » DC Public and Public Charter Schools

Reply to "Chronic absenteeism and truancy in DC"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous]I want to get inside the head of a kid who is chronically absent.

Your mom tells you to go to school, generally. She might help you get out of the house sometimes, if she isn’t focused on your siblings. More often she’s focused on other things, like most adults are. (i’ll try not to assume too much else.)

You’ve been getting bad test grades your whole life and the sense that you’re bad at that has come through. You have trouble expressing yourself in writing. Math is mystifying and annoyingly boring.

Your teachers are not people you connect with socially, mostly, either they are not of your background or have some superficial similarities but define themselves in contrast to people like you.

The things that excite you are outside school. The ways to make money that come through school aren’t obvious to you. From the flashy of course but most of the McJobs around you can be done by people with minimal education. You don’t see people taking middle school math and doing that in any job. No one you know writes like your English teacher wants for a living.

You’d rather hang with your friends. Who feel the same. You’d rather play video games. You’d like to avoid being told you’re going to fail for the rest of your life.

And what’s the alternative? Somebody is going to come find you and make you go to school? Everybody is out of school. Why are they going to focus on me?

And a high school diploma will get me a job. Maybe. But will I have to use the skills that I learned in high school? Not really. So why not just work hard enough to make sure I get the diploma? It’s not like I’m gonna be able to get some office job where I write all day or a STEM job where I need to do graduate school level math or coding to contribute. No I’m going into the service sector where all that matters is attitude and people skills and I already got that. [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics