Wake Up and Pay Attention

Quite accidentally, I stumbled across the secret to motivating the apathetic student. Every middle school and high school has a handful of them, intelligent students who simply do not care. They sleep or sleepwalk through their education.

I have one such self-misguided student in an English class. With jet black hair hanging like curtains to his nose and an unimaginative wardrobe of black and grey, he would fit in with the goth crowd of my youth although now they have been reclassified as emo.

Mostly he stares off into space with an inappropriate comment thrown in here or there. When he's not faking a coma, he's tweaking his hair with the precision of a plastic surgeon.

This quarter we have been working on mock trials, which the students have thoroughly enjoyed partially because it means that they get a break from their somewhat dull literature books.

As a fluke, the last and largest mock trial proved to perk up the emo student from his apathy-coma. The plaintiff’s last name is the same as the student’s first.

After his initial reaction of “What the hell,” his perplexity was compounded when he realized that the plaintiff was a woman suing for the wrongful death of her fiancé…who also shares his first name.

The class was generally amused with the ideas of the emo student having a fiancé. The merriment reached a boisterous level when the Trifecta matriarch won the role of his lovelorn fiancé. She focused her standard classroom theatrics towards her surrogate dead fiancé, the emo student.

The emo student willingly volunteered without even the need for me to threaten to confiscate his contraband i-pod. Of course, he offered to play the role of the dead fiancé, but I appreciate the little steps towards improvement.

For the next three days while the class worked on the mock trial, I never once had to interrupt his trace-like state to bring him back to the reality of his confinement in English class. The mock trial preformed that task for me. Every time his name was mentioned in the mock trial, he jerked his head up to identify the source through the light-filtering strains of his hair.

And his name was said very, very often.