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Originally Answered: What do teachers think of students who don't pay attention and fool around in class but still get great grades? ?
Sara Matthews
Feb 12, 2016
'First, let's understand that just because a student seems to be fooling around doesn't mean they're not listening to class. Some kids who are fooling around are at the same time picking up every word of class - it's remarkable and a wonderful gift to have. I learned this as a first year teacher when I called out a student who was reading a book in her lap during class. Just before class ended and wanting to teach her a lesson and expose her folly, I gave a pop quiz on what we did in class that day. She got a 100. Just because a student is fooling around doesn't necessarily mean they're not listening and learning.
And just because a student is sitting up straight in their chair with their eyes fixed on you and a pencil in their hand to take notes -that doesn't mean that student is listening. A still and quiet student who looks like a model student might at that moment be 1,000 miles away in their mind and not processing a word of what's said. I have rarely seen such a student do well in school - but if they can be happily 1000 miles away in their mind and still do well in school, I'm happy for them. I saw this once in a math class - a student who was born with such an intuitive understanding of math that he needed no instruction. He could drift far away in math class in his mind and still ace every test. If he had not drifted away in his mind in math class, he would have gone out of his mind. I saw it slightly more often in history class and there the story was - those few students were incredibly well read in history. They grew up teaching themselves history. They still had much to learn but what their classmates were learning was something they'd mastered long before. I gave them books to read in class - I preferred them to be reading books than drifting away from a discussion on cuneiform. They were ready to start reading cuneiform.
The students who can 'fool around' and still get what's going on in class are invariably quite bright. They can rapidly integrate complex concepts and make sense of the whole. They are so bright that their brains need information faster than it can be given out in a class of mixed ability students and so they can fool around to fill the time. They don't need to listen intently and work hard to put the pieces together. They grasp the concepts and walked in the door already knowing half of that year's curriculum.
Do I begrudge them any of that? Not at all. I plan my class to be interesting and I can keep their interest if I can move at their pace but many of their classmates can't move at their pace. I can and sometimes have taken the time and made the effort to write a separate curriculum for such students. But it takes a great deal of time to write a year's worth of separate curriculum and I can't always accomplish that.
All students need to keep their fooling around close at hand - chaos is not good for classrooms. No student should distract other students particularly not the students who need to hear, process, consider and reflect on the material in order to understand it. In the better world, we'd offer the very bright students the opportunity of a school planned for them where they could be working in the lab learning how to make life-saving drugs or developing a new strain of corn that needs no water to grow or translating Sumerian cuneiform.'
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