I’m back from a week’s vacation. I hope everyone had a restful 4th of July. Now, let’s get to it.
I’ve been meaning to write about an article I read a few weeks ago titled “How School Can Make Students (and Teachers) Feel Dumb.” The article appeared in EducationWeek and was authored by Patrick O’Connor, a public high school English teacher, a journalist, and a writer of fiction and poetry.
O’Connor begins his opinion piece by sharing a classroom story:
“I was projecting a document onto the whiteboard when a student in the back of the class leaned over to her friend, whispered something, and they both started to laugh, glancing up at me.
‘What?’ I asked.
They were silent.
‘What’s so funny?’ I asked again.
The girl pointed at the whiteboard. ‘You used ‘are’ instead of ‘our,’ Mr. O’Connor.’
‘Oh, thanks!’ I said. ‘I’ll fix it.’
This wasn’t the first time I had made such a mistake, and after class the girl walked over and stopped in front of me, seeming like she wanted to say something. ‘Yes?’ I asked, thinking she might want to apologize for laughing at me.
‘It’s just that…’ She stopped, trying to find the right words.
‘Go ahead,’ I encouraged her.
‘It’s just that I’ve never had an English teacher who couldn’t spell.’ she said.”
O’Connor shares another story:
“Later, in the 6th grade, my teacher had asked the class a question and when no one answered, he said, ‘Come on! Even Patrick could answer this one!’ Everyone laughed. I laughed! But, inside, I wanted to slip out of a window and disappear. Another time, my neighbor’s dad stopped me when my stutter wouldn’t allow me to complete a sentence. ‘You stuttering idiot,’ he said.”
O’Connor continues:
“There have been hundreds of other moments like this in which I felt like the idiot they said I was. Even after graduating from college with honors, earning a master’s degree in education, becoming a high school English teacher, and getting published as a writer, I still feel like the idiot they said I was. I don’t know how to shake the feeling.”
O’Connor finishes his article by sharing how one of his students sees these places like schools:
“He told me school discourages individual ways of learning, thinking, and communicating. Teachers look for standard forms, in writing and speech, he said. Standardized tests, he pointed out as an example, award students who can think quickly and can retain and recall information under pressure, but not all people have brains that work this way.
Such tests – and education as a whole – weed out students like him and leave them feeling stupid. Many of his friends, he said, dropped out for this reason. They just feel dumb.”
A close friend and public school colleague of mine once told me that our jobs as adult learning leaders was to make our kids feel “smarter and stronger – every day.”
Why isn’t that the rallying cry for every public school in the nation, to make every young learner feel “smarter and stronger,” instead of “stupid and weak?”
When I worked inside the public school system, there were way too many kids leaving school at the end of the day thinking and behaving in “hopeless” ways instead of being “hopeful.”
This is one of the reasons I am skeptical about the future of public schools as they exist today. They treat too many of our young people as “not being able to reach the standard” and therefore being labeled a “failure.” In their zeal for reaching standards, too many schools send a message of “hopelessness” and “failure” to those who need “hopeful coaching” the most.
Why would anyone, in their right mind, want to show up daily to a place that sends such a mean and detrimental message?
When I was younger, I thought “dropouts” were the ones that really didn’t get how important school was to their future and their well-being. Now, I’m not so sure. It seems the “dropout” might know more about what public schools really are than what we realize.
Til tomorrow. SVB
A Better Path to Learning 
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