One of my students the other day came up to me and declared, "It don't matter what I do in this class, they'll just graduate me anyway." Mind you, he's a sophomore who has has the credits of a freshman.
Some of these kids don't listen to reason. They are so used to getting shuttled from grade to grade that once they get to high school, they don't realize until it's too late that we don't socially promote students at this level. WE HOLD YOU BACK.
No amount of direct discussion will change this student's perspective. And he is a total nightmare in class. Luckily, many students acknowledge him as a negative example and do not follow his lead.
What would you do with a child like that? They have no parents, or have foster parents who don't really discipline them at home and they just come to school to goof off. Their backpacks are just for show. They sit there are pretend they can rap off the top of their heads. They have no academic interests in school and they just create a hostile learning environment. There's no one-on-one or group intervention that works for this student.
Unfortunately, these are cases where I am glad they have really crummy attendance.
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You can't do much.
Strategically, the best way to combat apathy is by sucker-punching someone into caring (such as telling exploiting your student's obvious deficiencies).
No amount of reason will work (remember, you're talking about individuals that lack complete logic). But laughing at them and calling them pathetic because they're obviously deficient/inferior may actually force them to "prove" you wrong.
Of course, this kind of action is strictly prohibited. And you'll probably get shanked in the process.
But in any case, it's definitely an uphill battle when today's biggest role models are shallow and unskilled high school grads that are essentially very lucky with an innate skill (i.e. Lebron James), have a very supportive background, or both (i.e. Kanye West).
What you get are people who believe that they, too, can achieve anything with style and no substance. And without an understanding of the probability of achieving such success, they instead end up falling flat on their faces.
In any case, might as well just tell your kid to not show up to class if he's not going to behave, or to just mark him absent even if he does show up in person but not in attention.
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