My week was pretty full, lots of meetings and assignments to grade. I felt like the new year has been productive. But today but I made a student cry which wasn't nice. She told me she hated my class and luckily for her there's less than 1 week left of it. It kind of surprised me and I tried to be nice as it unfolded. I have posted instructions on my google classroom and a video on how to do the assignment in question. When I asked if she had looked at the instructions, she said no and claimed she hated google classroom! Well, of course she was frustrated! I spell everything out for my students pretty clearly and give presentations, then offer videos for support. So it's pretty frustrating for me to have a student fall apart in frustration not understanding how to do a project because she refuses to look at instructions. I wasn't sure how to deal with the situation. It's certainly not nice to hear a kid tell you how much they hate your class while bawling their head off. When I relayed the story to my daughter she assured me the student was upset about other things not about my class but I wonder. I'll be honest, I create classes that allow students to work for independently allowing me a lot of free time to multitask. I love digital classes because I AM COMFORTABLE on the the computer. I forget not all student are as comfortable. We talk about 21st century skills as educators and often we mean technology but I think some of those skills are about finding answers on your own and knowing how to navigate the classroom without a teacher holding your hand the whole way. As the semester comes to an end I offer anonymous classroom evaluations to get feedback. In my illustrator class one student wrote, "I just wanted to learn more advanced techniques in this class that will make my life a lot easier in Illustrator. We went over pretty basic concepts but I'd love to go more In depth. The projects that we did were fun and all but I felt like I got barely any practice with new features. I came into this class not knowing much about illustrator which is why I took it but many of the assignments weren't as meaningful and fulfilling as I thought they'd be." Wow! That is the kind of feedback I want but it hurts a little. The problem is that I also got, "Nope! I think this class was great with covering subjects." I have students of all levels, grades 9 through 12. I thought by having everything spelled out in google classroom I was helping to pull up some of my younger and lower end kids but that's only if they can read directions.