I Don't Understand My Students

It always happens that when it comes to final projects, some students do an amazing job, and some depress me with their lackadaisical approach. It happened on one of the projects in my second hour class--it was a lame website, with few of the features that I asked my students to consider as well as few of the concepts I asked them to discuss. I was so disappointed in the absolute lack of work that they did. In fact, I wound up asking them all of these questions about why they made the choices they did, because they didn't answer any of the questions I thought they should have. As the students were leaving, I heard one say, "That was a really hard project," and I wondered what he could have meant. Because it didn't look to me that they spent more than a couple of hours putting it together.

Then another group did a project that was racist against Muslims, and I hoped desperately that there were no Muslims in my class. I asked them about why they approached their dystopia with such virulent anti-Muslim racism, and they said they basically extrapolated on the current way society is structured.... Granted, dystopias are often founded on racist principles, but I've spent 15 weeks talking about why that stuff is bad. I wish they would have framed their racism against people who don't exist--that is, I wish they had imagined some other planet, not the Earth, and had expressed their xenophobia toward a race that didn't have members that we could recognize. I tried to frame their racism in these terms when I called them on it... but I don't think they were aware of how, by reinforcing this current hate, even if we are to read their work as dystopic, there are still real-world implications.

Sometimes I think I'm a terrible teacher. Especially when I see the kind of work I saw today.