Story: The Sleepy Students

One morning in September 2016, I went to a class to replace a teacher who could not attend school because of an emergency. As a substitute teacher, I was provided with a lesson plan. Before starting the lesson, I called out the names of the students in alphabetic order and looked at them one by one to make sure they were present. There were 18 students in the class as a total, 8 males and 10 females.On a quick observation, I judged that 14 learners looked like they were ready to learn, while the other 4 were too busy fanning their bodies with their textbooks. I advised them to settle and focus on the lesson at hand.

I then proceeded with the lesson which included the following directions:

Condition the students and arrange seats so that a pleasant learning environment is created.
Introduce the subject matter: the square-based pyramid.
Motivate students by showing them some texamples square-based pyramids, then ask the question "How many pyramid forms are there?
Deliver learning objectives

For a moment, after opening the lesson, I saw that 4 of the male students who had been fidgeting previously had finally stopped, instead however, they were now chatting to their friends next to them, breaking their fellow classmates attention as they did so. I went to them and communicated my concerns, hoping that they would now focus on the lesson. As a strategy, I asked a question about the square-based pyramid. One of the wrestles students quickly began to pay attention to the material when he realised that he did not have an answer, while 3 more students were not moved by my intervention. One of them even admitted that he was feeling to sleepy to learn!

Having to move on with the lesson, I continued with the lesson plan despite the fact that there were unfocused learners:

Learners were reminded of the pyramidal elements theylearned.
Teachers presents teaching materials through PowerPoint presentation.
The teacher displays how to draw a regular pyramid using the PowerPoint slides.
Students are asked to draw a pyramid in their books.
Teacher displays images of T.ABCD pyramid and pyramid blanket.
Teacher presents how to determine the surface area of the square-based pyramid.
The teacher presents two examples of questions about the matter (at this point I noticed that the 3 learners were still not paying attention).
Teachers hand out worksheets to learners and explain how to complete them. A total of 15 students did the question on the student worksheet. While 3 students complained, they claimed they did not to know what to do

After the students did the exercises, I closed the lesson by doing the following activities:

Summarize the information learnt, with the students.
Provide homework questions to learners. This action is in accordance with the main teacher's wishes of the subject.
The teacher conveys a moral message.

How DO you get your students’ attention?
As I mentioned in the beginning, my presence in the classroom was to substitute for the usual teacher. But despite the fact that I was inly standing in as a substitute, I still came prepared. I brought all of my teaching aids and n=media resources. But as prepared as I was, I still could not get 3 of the 18 students to focus and at the end, despite my efforts, the did not learn the lesson.

This resulted infailure for me as a teacher, over and above the failure of the students. Although this happens in classrooms all the time, I could not help feeling disappointed with myself.It reminded me of a memory I have where I also experienced drowsiness in class as a student. But when my teacher hit the table with a ruler, I was soon awakened and he had my attention!

While I do not condone aggressive acts, perhaps as educators we do need to go to more extreme measures to grab the focus and attention of our more rebellious and “sleepy” students?

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