“He never forgot the principal’s next comment, ‘…your test scores and grades indicate that you shouldn’t probably try to go to college. I think you might be best to think of a career driving a truck and working a ranch. My advice to you is not to consider higher education’ “.
(Philip, 2007, p.70)
This quote struck me not because I was surprised, but because I connected to it on a personal level. For better or worse, I have had teachers who have told me that I cannot do something or will not have a successful future in something.I am still facing people in my experiences telling me what they feel I can or can’t do. My struggle is how teachers get to this mindset.
The risk in accepting that not every student can be successful in every subject is that we can make damaging assumptions about our students. If we are a math teacher and know a student is great in ELA, we may lower our expectations for this student. We must be extremely cautious in telling students that should focus on some particular subject because they are not good in another. As we know, the perception of others can greatly shape adolescents. I wonder how we can maintain the growth mindset, while acknowledging how our students have greater strengths in some subjects than others. From a personal professional perspective, I hope never to be the teacher a student seeks to prove wrong. Unfortunately, the negative influences are often stronger than the positive so all the more motivation to be the positively motivating teacher.
I was shocked when I read this passage in the reading! My heart ached for that boy. You’re absolutely right – as teachers, it is hard to think that a student might not be doing well in our class not because he doesn’t do well in school, but because there is a different subject that he does do well in. Us teachers tend to take it personally when we really shouldn’t. As educators we need to work on not lowering our expectations of a student. Even if we don’t do it on purpose, subconsciously we know that that student just is not into French, or whatever it is that we’re teaching. I know that logically most students are not good at every single subject, but we forget that when we are teaching something that comes easily to us.