I was tutoring a little girl yesterday and when the work became too difficult for her, she told me that she couldn’t do it. “This is too hard, I am not smart enough!” she told me. Watching her say this I felt that she really believed this to be true. However, I could see that if she would only apply herself she could be capable of so much more. This led me to think about what could have caused her to be in this situation. How do kids become convinced they are not smart enough or incapable of trying? I thought back to my recent kindergarten and preschool experiences. I recall a young girl I worked with through pre-kindergarten and kindergarten. Almost immediately, the school the teachers labeled her “At Risk.” She came from a low-income family, and seemed to have problems catching on to new concepts and ideas. Some of the teachers I worked with told me that they had seen her type before and she would be the same kid that would have problems all through school. But why I thought? Why do we give these kids labels and plan their fate for them. Once teachers talk and give these labels to the kids, they along with their peers pick up on it. I ask everyone their opinion on what we can do as educators to get rid of stereotypes and help all children to meet his or her own potential? Please email me for answers.
Re: Stereotyping
When I taught Grades 1 and 2, one little girl walked in the first day and announced to me “I have a reading problem” — first words out of her mouth. In the same class a little boy’s mother and the school secretary came in and gave me a long talk about how he had learning problems and the school psychologist said I was to do memory exercises like showing him a ballon, putting it in a cupboard, and having him find it the next day.
Well, the little girl was actually not bad for Grade 2 and with a good phonics review and lots of practice by the end of the year was reading chapter books, and the little boy was the only person in the school (including the secretary and the principal) who could find the three-hole punch and some shelving — it was more his mother who had problems as she demonstrated later in the year when she left the family.
Both of the mothers came in and made a lot of noise with the principal that I was doing everything wrong, going to the extent of sneaking into the class to take books when I was at an activity so they could yell at the principal about how bad the work was — they had an investment in having their kids be special, who wants success in the general program, I guess.
Anyway I worked hard all year on teaching basics and several years later I was complimented that this same group had the greatest self-esteem, they were convinced they could do anything. Success in really mastering reading and math worked wonders breeding more success.
You can’t wave a magic wand and hand out self-esteem, but if you work hard all year and the child masters a difficult skill and finds herself as able as (or more than) her classmates in many areas, her self-esteem will blossom.
P
I think some of the “I’m stupid” stuff just comes from being in a classroom of peers who are all doing work that is far ahead of you. The kid doesn’t have to be told anything. They can see for themselves that they are not as far as their classmates. They see the other kids are reading chapter books and they are still reading “baby” books. If the teacher has the kids grade each other’s papers then the kids see, again, the big gap between one or two kids and the other kids.
Re: Stereotyping
Generally people get that “I’m Stupid” attitude either because people tell them they are (either directly or indirectly), or because they are smart enough to perceive that they are struggling to do what’s easy for others.
Lots of times, the attitude magnifies the reality and distorts the perceptions so that everything is filtered through the “but I’m stupid” filter. You can tell me a hundred times that I’m doing really well, but hey, you are just being nice — I know better. I don’t see when other people actually are struggling; if I get an 85, I assume everybody else got 99s.
One thing that helped a couple of my sixth graders was teaching them that people were not as simple as being smart or stupid; we had lessons on what memory was and how it could make you *look* smart or stupid, and it was certainly a piece of the picture, but that you could work with the memory you had to bring ouit more of your intelligence. I’ve got students now who think they’re stupid because they look at all 150 things they need to know for the biology test, and look at them again and again, and can’t remember them. When we broke them down into 4 or 5 at a time, suddenly they got smarter.
THe other thing I try to do is to show the connection between working at somehting and doing well in it. Instead of just praising a good grade, I’ll ask how they studied, or how they did that problem.
There really is a *huge* difference between what you can achieve with the same brain cells when you are thinking “well, I probably am noty going to be able to do this… it’s all pretty hopeless… yup, see?” and “Hmmm… this isn’t working, but I *know* there’s an answer — there has to be! I just have to figure it out!”
Oh gosh, I don’t really have a solution for you. This is a really serious problem and really does have effects on children’s performance. Maybe you have heard of the experiment where they told one group of teachers that the kids were of average IQ and another that the kids looked average but that they were ready to make a big developmental jump. The later kids made huge gains by virtue of the beliefs and expectations these teachers had of them.
In my two week or so experiment at a certain charter school, one of the teachers I initially had respect for said that the kids were just “stupid”. YIKES! (As it was I do not believe that to be at all the case.)
I would tell the individual student you work with that she is bright and capable but learns things in a different way. These beliefs that are passed along thru expectations are very subtle and hard to overcome. It is a huge problem that is difficult to deal with except thru institutional change. Some schools with particularly strong and influential principals do change for the better.
—des