Celebrating Mediocrity

Remember Neal? (See Playing the Percentages.) Because Neal cheated on his Lord of the Flies essay—twice—he only managed to scrape by fourth quarter with a low D. The only way he could pass the course and graduate is if he somehow were the recipient of another miracle that would also allow him to pass the final exam.

Before we proceed, let's have some more background on Neal. He is at the close of his fifth year of high school; he lost a year somewhere in the earlier grades and is taking English 12 for original credit. Neal has a legitimate learning disability and has had an IEP since early Elementary school. Unfortunately, he is one of many who have used an IEP as a crutch, and thus his writing and reading comprehension skills are profoundly limited. What's more, Neal has a debilitating fear of failure: he has developed a defense mechanism that reassures himself that if he doesn't really try, then he doesn't really fail.

Neal has somehow managed to float through twelve—er, thirteen—years of school before he actually needed to work toward anything. For one reason or another, teachers have passed him along, possibly in fear of having to reteach this truly annoying human being for another year.

Then he got to English 12.

As I have discussed in an earlier post, Neal did little but serve as a distraction in my class for two quarters. He snapped out of this funk sometime during third quarter and put forth enough effort to barely pass. (That is, if you call 60% passing, which our district does.) I must say that he has put forth a sincere effort since he resolved himself to graduate...until, of course, he decided to plagiarize a major fourth quarter assignment.

So it's all come down to Neal's final exam. He is a notoriously bad test taker; he hasn't come close to passing an English exam all year. I expected the "Old Neal" to show up the day of the exam: enter the room with a defeatist attitude, whimsically bubble answers, and write a few barely-coherent sentences for an essay.

But the Old Neal didn't show up that day. He went to the library for small group testing; he receives extended time on assessments when necessary. The Special Ed department chair later told me that Neal spent a period and a half—about two hours—taking the multiple choice section of his exam. When I got to his essay in the stack, it was a page and a half long—considerably more lengthy than anything else he has written for me all year. Once the exam was graded, I calculated the score: with the County's curve, Neal earned a D.

This may seem anticlimactic; is a D (curved!) really a great achievement? To Neal, however, this is more than he had hoped to achieve: he tried his best, and he did not fail.

Although I stand by my credo that every student needs to have a knowledge of great works of literature, this is really my secondary purpose. Neal may not be able to have more than a literal comprehension of a text, but he successfully completed a character-building exercise. I hope in the future he remembers that cheating will get him nowhere, second chances should not to be taken for granted, and honest effort will yield positive results. I celebrate Neal's achievement with him; he didn't fail as my student, and I like to believe that I didn't fail as his teacher.