Hide and Seek in Education

Rarely will I post about my teaching experience, but this week has just been too good to pass up.

There's a boy in my 10th grade English class, let's call him Dennis.**

Dennis has been trying to get me to play hide and seek with him the past few lessons and I find it hilarious, in a disturbing way.

After homophobic racist behavior, I usually ask him to wait in the corridor while I write him a pass to visit another class for the remainder of our lesson. This is when he likes to start making the hide and seek references: "Well, I'm going and you're never going to come find me, so I WIN and YOU LOSE!" He throws down his pencil, slams his chair under the desk and struts out not unlike an infuriated drag queen.

::blink blink:: "He thinks I'm going to go looking for him..."

Leggers is a common game among school boys... they LOVE trying to get teachers to chase them around school buildings.

The thing is, that I don't actually dislike Dennis. I wish I could find a way to help him calm down and focus so he can learn. I wish I could get him to focus or even look at the pages of the text while we're reading in class.

He is terribly funny sometimes, like Yakko Warner on crack. But I fear that this evasive "showy" escapism is merely a ruse to avoid having to feel like he can't read or calculate and that he doesn't think he could even if he tried.

In my experience, whether it's blatant rudeness, the silent treatment, or merely disappearing, the children who act out in the classroom tend to feel so unconfident about themselves that they are too scared even to try.

There have been moments in my life where I was anxious and worried about my achievement, how I looked academically to my peers, but even if I fell on my face, it didn't paralyze me. I realize when I look into the attitudes and behavior of some of my students that I have never felt the fear that some of them feel on a daily basis, and I just hope I can figure out a way to help them over it.

Thoughts?