Last year, TikToker Sha (@shabooyahc) was teaching 8th-grade science. In class, they had been studying ionic bonds, covalent bonds, and chemical bonds in general for about seven weeks. It was finally time for their first test.
She told every single one of her 110 students to bring a pencil, a fully charged tablet, and a copy of the periodic table in order to pass the test.
They would not be able to pass the test if they did not have these three items. She made her instructions clear three weeks before the test, giving them plenty of time to prepare.
On the day of the test, about 60 of the 110 students brought all three things. This put Sha in a predicament because now half her students wouldn’t pass the test.
She really wanted to give the kids another chance, but they did not follow the directions that were given to them in advance.
She even provided many opportunities for her students to obtain the three items. At the beginning of the year, she printed out stacks of periodic tables and left them in the front of the classroom because she knew her 8th graders would lose their own copies.
Additionally, she emailed her students’ parents a week before the test and let them know what items their kids must bring. In the days before the test, she offered to print out more periodic tables for any students who somehow didn’t have one. But of course, no one told her that they needed one.
Sha also bought 500 pencils at the beginning of the year in the hopes that they would last the whole school year. She set out about 100 or so at a time for students who needed pencils to use.
They went through 500 pencils in four weeks and still proceeded not to bring any pencils to class with them.
Sign up for Chip Chick’s newsletter and get stories like this delivered to your inbox.
Finally, she told them to ask their parents and their neighbors because it was not her responsibility to buy them all pencils. As for tablets, the tablets are provided by the school district. Each tablet comes with a charger, and students should come to school each day with a charged tablet.
If, for any reason, their tablets are not charged, they are allowed to charge them in any classroom at one of several charging stations.
So, these students actively made the choice to show up unprepared for the test. At some point, they must learn that there are consequences to their actions.
Sha saw multiple kids give up on the test almost immediately. Some threw the test away, others handed it in blank, and several slept through the entire test. The kids who actually tried got decent scores.
But the kids who failed every single class still managed to move on to high school, not because of the teachers but because of the law.
Teachers are no longer allowed to hold students back. Sha hopes that the kids will learn their lesson about how choices have consequences.
By Emily Chan
Emily Chan is a writer who covers lifestyle and news content. She graduated from Michigan State University with a degree in... More about Emily Chan
