Why are high school students so hard to deal with?

Argh, it is so frustrating to have classes that just don't want to do anything. These classes are really hard for me because I was an enthusasitic student in high school. If I had to spend my day in school, I should get something out of it, right? And of all the classes I took, German was one of my favorites, so I just don't understand when students don't really care about English.

On a brighter note, I did have one class today that went so well. Over the past months, I have noticed that I don't really need to prepare all that much for some of my classes, I end up doing a lot of things off the cuff, and unfortunately, they end up working. I say unfortunately because if they didn't work, I would spend more time prepping. Over the past few weeks, one of my 10th grade classes has been discussing violence, guns and school. We read some articles on the Columbine shooting that happened in 1999, and also read from a fiction book about the same kind of thing. Unfortunately, recent events at Northern Illinois University became a relevant topic. Since it happened, it seemed like a good idea to talk with the students about it. I gave them just what was on NIU's website about the shooting, and they had to turn it into a newspaper article. After discussing their articles, we started discussing the pattern of people who committed these acts. So I started generalizing, all of these people are male, why is that. And that is where they really started discussing. We talked about the generalizations, about how society has changed in the past 60 years, and how that might lead a person to become who they are. Even though the topic was grim, managing to get 16 and 17 year olds to actively discuss is encouraging to me.

And also this week, my mentor teacher and I were talking about one of the 7th grade classes. Apparently, once or twice a week, university students come in and teach the class (obviously when I am not there). These are students who are almost done with their studies, so they have taken about five years of school and plenty of education classes. While we were talking about them, she mentioned that I do a better job teaching than they do. Carsta said that these students (the university ones) come in with their lesson plan and have pretty much every minute planned out, they have no wiggle room. And in teaching, you need to have that room, because sometimes the students just take much longer to understand something I think is simple, but then the next time, they will rush through other things I thought would be hard for them. And often, we have to change lesson plans at that moment, because something I might think is great, the students will not respond to it at all. But it was good receiving praise, because I often feel like I am doing a terrible job.