What if our students just don't get the job done?

There was a recent JEA listserv thread about students not finishing a yearbook, and what to do about it. Beyond being angry, I have no handy answer, no cookbook recipe for this issue.

I will offer this: What is the worst that might happen if a yearbook were not published until several months later than scheduled? Would the history somehow be damaged? Would the truths be somehow less true? So please opt for completing the best book possible, rather than simply cutting your losses.

But the discussion brought up so many thoughts, which do not add up to a clear thesis but help explain the lack of an easy answer to the original problem. Here we go:

Yearbook is part of the curriculum (if students are offered a class), but it's also somehow "outside" the curriculum, providing THE history of the year. It is an artifact that is treated as a complete work of art, despite the fact that students were learning as the book was being created. Heaven forbid that spreads from the first deadline do not measure up to spreads from a later deadline!

Many yearbook advisers struggle with what to do about customers (students) who simply fail to pick up their copy of the book. Are we enabling their bad behavior by tracking them down and thrusting a book into their hands? Or should we honor their choice to waste some money (and leave us with a few boxes of rejected books)?

Yearbooks should be produced by students, but the pride, professionalism, and even job security of the adviser can't be separated from that student work.

When a football coach happens to be working with a mediocre group of athletes, the record of the team likely represents that mediocrity. No one would seriously consider having the coaching staff take the field, and thus improving the quality of the team.

On the other hand, a coach who never has a winning season... at some point, there will be a new coach.

Coaches usually have the option to cut certain players who are not up to the task, but many advisers don't have that option or get caught in a numbers game (where the course may be cut if a minimum number of students are not enrolled).

Sometimes students are simply dumped into a class, without much interest or motivation, and then live down to that... and are then marked with an "F"... well, that just seems punitive and maybe a little mean. Who is grading the counselors or administrators or the overall school environment that put those young people in such an untenable position? Imagine students being forced to play football, no matter their size or skill or interest.

But perhaps football is too important to mess with like that.

When we find ourselves surrounded by students to whom failure is not all that daunting... well, our community must have issues that go far beyond our class or our school.

Perhaps my "spinning" arises from the fact that I always thought the students and I were in this wacky thing together, and that makes it difficult to assign blame. We failed many, many times. But we didn't stop playing the game.

I feel sympathy for frustrated educators, feeling defeated at the end of a long year. But there is good news! We can do better next school year and getting better starts now.