The hard life of a teacher

Today I’m learning what it is like to be a disheartened teacher. More than anything this year, I want to impart an understanding and passion for social justice/theology in these students. I’m not overly concerned with memorizing minute details or arguing complex theological content. Most of all I want the students to grasp what social justice is and WANT to be able to apply it. The problem is they don’t have the tools or motivation to get there. I want to explore social justice with them, but they want to do just enough to get by in this class. We had our first test today. It was 50 points, 39 questions. It wasn’t easy, but almost all of it was exact words of what we had gone through in class. 4 students got a C or above, 7 failed it. My first instinct said this is a result of my teaching inexperience. I’m a poor teacher, and that’s why the students aren’t learning. However, after thinking about it a little more, I don’t think that’s really the case. Half these students came into my class whining about having a test or saying they forgot about the test (even though I mentioned it 3 times in our last class and had it written in huge, red letters on the whiteboard). Clearly, they didn’t study simply because they forgot or because they didn’t care to. That’s not poor teaching, that’s poor motivation. The problem is deciding my response. Do I play the TLC teacher and require students to take the initiative to improve their grades, at the very real risk of letting them fail? Or do I invest a lot of time and effort into understanding each student and really help them become motivated to do the work and receive good grades, at the risk of babying them into academic adequacy? The latter seems like the better option on paper, but I have serious doubts both about my efficacy in using that approach and the effect that approach will have on the students’ future educational endeavors.