Many teachers – and it is very difficult emotionally to even say this – teach in a way that makes certain kids think that the teacher doesn’t like them. Who does that? It’s those kids at the bottom of the pecking order in every class.
But the teacher doesn’t see that in the kid. They see such kids in a fairly neutral light, just assuming that they are lazy. They don’t see that the repeated bad grades over years have a massively deleterious effect on those kids who are forced to occupy the academic basement of the class. Yes, we force them to the bottom – it’s part of the systemic unnoticed social injustice piece in our schools.
But none of this is necessary. We just have to make up our minds to teach in a more inclusive way. We have a deep professional responsibility to never send a message to any of our students that they are somehow inferior. These car wrecks with certain students usually happen because of the way we assess our students, but we send the message in other ways, all connected to the invisible ways that we disenfranchise kid in our classroom without even knowing it.
As I have said many times, the research shows that all people can learn a language and enjoy doing so. It’s not that way in other school subject, but it’s that way in languages. We need to read the research and change our thinking on that. We just have to stop giving a certain group of kids in each of our classes the idea that they don’t measure up.
The result of giving five or ten kids in each class that message is that it causes them to intensely dislike us. We don’t see that. Not seeing that in such kids is a disaster for both teacher and student. It puts up a wall. Again, the great sadness in this is that according to the research those kids do measure up.
It’s up to us to reverse the animosity by giving those kids experiences in our classroom that build them up and don’t shove them down into the bottom academic group.
We can hate the system that turned these kids into – what look like to us – dead people, but we can’t hate the kids.
Does any of this have anything to do with school shootings?