“It is also critical that the presenter and participants focus on describing what is there and not what seems to be missing. […] The Prospect Center processes are also useful and are more widely associated with the powerful and respectful way they allow teachers to assess children, not as students with ‘deficits’ of understanding but as full human beings making sense of the world.”

Excerpt from Knoester (2008) “Learning to Describe, Describing to Understand”

In the first week of this new school year, I heard the term IEP, or Individualized Education Program, for the very first time and have since heard it referenced to repeatedly. In the midst of this week’s reading, as well as my ever-growing understanding of IEPs, this quote particularly struck/stuck out to me. Though an IEP does include a section on the growth that educators hope for and believe in for their students with IEPs, I couldn’t help but feel a heaviness as I read the on-going list of “deficits” particular students are labeled as having. Of course, in a vast number of cases, these students are dealing with very real struggles, inhibiting their ability to learn without extra help or accommodations. In a number of other cases, however, faced with the belief that we live in a world full of increasingly high expectations, short attention spans, an overall lack of patience, and overdiagnosis—be that in the medical or educational realms—the skeptic in me questions the validity of the claims made in these “other cases”. As Knoester implies, educators have a unique opportunity and power to help kids see their true potential; to help them make sense of our chaotic world. He then goes on to say that through the power of reflection and description of students, educators can “cut through stereotypes and easy characterizations” of their students. To stand in front of a group of adolescents and expect them to act like fully developed adults is positively fantastical. As I reflect upon this incongruous expectation, I am left only with the feisty retort of Jane Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet while discussing Mr. Darcy’s expectation and definition of a “truly accomplished women”, “I never saw such a [child]. [They] would certainly be a fearsome thing to behold.”