I'm a Big Meany

I made two students cry today.  I take no joy in this, but I do have to admit to a grim satisfaction.  Both are two of about a dozen students who have exerted little effort into my class, and are now failing. It’s only the first quarter; they have ten weeks to bring their grade up before it pounds their GPA.  But suddenly the gravity of an impending F has struck the masses, and these two were bold enough to suddenly take action.  Both approached me at the beginning of their respective class periods to ask if they could do extra credit or be excused from some missing assignments.  Now if a student is experiencing some trauma at home, or has been classified by our Special Ed department as needing some accommodations, I’m more than happy to work with the student to improve their grade.  I never excuse an assignment, but under the right circumstances, I’ll extend the deadline or allow the student to do alternate, but equally rigorous, work.
These two students do not qualify for that kind of courtesy. Both admitted that they just didn’t do the work because it bored them, or they didn’t feel like it, and now they’re in trouble at home because of the resulting grade. One girl, as an excuse as to why she didn’t turn in a literature project, said, “Well, I just don’t like to read.”  I told her that I didn’t know what kind of response she expected from me, as I am an ENGLISH TEACHER. I didn’t go into teaching for the money; I went into it because of my love of the subject matter. And this was an interesting assignment: I let the students choose their books, reminding them ad nauseum to choose a book about a subject they love. As a result, if I have to read one more literature log on Twilight, I’m going to suck the blood out of a deer myself. But at least the kids are reading, and I have to remind myself of that.
This student stared at an open book for five weeks during Silent reading time in class, then informed me the day the assignment was due that she didn’t like the book she choose, so she wasn’t going to do the project. Now this same girl is one of two students asking to do extra credit, which means I have to think of an assignment, and then grade it when they decide to hand it in. I told both kids the same thing: “You choose not to do the work I assigned, so why would I give you more work? How is that fair to your classmates who did the work they were supposed to, when they were supposed to?”  That’s when the tears sprung into their eyes.  I think because I am basically good-natured in class, they were not expecting me to be so inflexible on this. But I couldn’t shy away from teaching them a lesson.
So maybe English class isn’t their cup of tea. I get that. But this is a bigger issue. Even if an F goes home on the quarter grade report, maybe they’ll learn that sometimes in life, we have to do things that bore us. I wish life could be all house parties and days at the beach, I really do. But life involves a certain level of drudgery and routine for most of us, and it’s an unavoidable evil. It’s better that they learn that blowing off a required task results in an “F”, rather than a pink slip. Or that they have to explain that failure to their parents, rather than to the family of a person whose death they inadvertently caused because they didn’t pay close attention to a prescription’s directions or the instruction manual for heavy machinery.  They have to learn how to learn, and deal. 
So, in each case, I handed the kid a tissue and told them to go outside to get themselves together.  I don’t feel badly about it, and I’m sure they muttered every expletive in their vocabulary about me.  It’s a cliche to say that they’ll thank me someday, but I can send this little lesson out to the cosmos and hope that the result down the line will make each of these kids a slightly better person. I’m not holding my breath for a Thank You card, though.