Chapter 9: When Things Go Wrong

This chapter of Fires focuses on what to do when something goes wrong in your classroom, or students become discouraged and you don't know how to motivate them anymore. A lot of the student insight in this chapter came from students who had been through discouragement or had teachers who were discouraged, and their advice was about how to help students overcome it, or how to overcome it yourself. It not only talked about students who were discouraged, but also talked about how to handle, when you as a teacher, become discouraged.

I really enjoyed how this chapter talked about the teacher side of things going wrong and teacher's being discouraged, because I think it happens a lot more than we, as students, would realize. I also really liked how most of the advice in this chapter came from students who had overcome that discouragement, had overcome skipping classes and dropping out of school, to show that those students still might be motivated.