It’s been an interesting few weeks for me.
Since writing about the lunacy of punitive grading policies, I’ve been wrastlin’ with teachers on the Twitters who believe that giving zeros and rigidly enforcing deadlines is essential because it “teaches students responsibility.”
I knew that would happen. This ain’t my first rodeo.
Teachers tend to embrace the strategies that they experienced as learners — and given that most teachers were successful in classrooms where punitive grading policies were the norm, they don’t see any reason to question those practices today.
That drives me a bit bananas, but I just lean in and ask the same question over and over again: “Are your strategies working? Does giving zeros really result in students struggling with deadlines who suddenly learn responsibility?”
My hope is that at some point, teachers will recognize that teaching responsibility IS important, but that giving zeros DOESN’T work to accomplish that goal.
However, one interaction that I had over the last two weeks has me riled up.
After I argued that all students WANT to succeed in schools, a teacher — who’s name I’ve removed from this post to protect his identity — responded with:
Now, let me start by acknowledging that teachers DO feel incredible pressure to help students succeed — and when we work in dysfunctional systems that aren’t set up to give us the best chance to meet that goal, it can cause us to fall into a depression.
There’s nothing more discouraging than knowing that your job is to help students succeed yet realizing that you have to hurdle barrier after barrier created by others that you have no real control over.
But arguing that “not all students will succeed” or that “not all students want to learn” is something that I just cannot tolerate out of classroom teachers.
Here’s why: The minute that you embrace those notions is the minute that you quit trying to find solutions to help more students to learn at higher levels.
You begin picking and choosing which students you are going to help and which students you are going to quit on. You make assumptions about your students — figuring that you already know who is going to succeed and who is going to fail.
And guess what: Your struggling students pick up on your perceptions of them pretty darn quick.
They recognize that you don’t believe in them — so they quit trying, too. After all, why should they invest in your learning space when you have already made it clear that you aren’t willing to invest in them?
Let me state this as simply as I can: The actions and investment that you see from the students in your classroom are often a direct reflection of your core beliefs about what they are capable of.
Or stated even more simply: Give up on kids and they are going to give up on you.
Believing that all kids are capable of learning at high levels is a nonnegotiable — and if you can’t bring that to the table, it’s time to find a new profession.
#steppingoffsoapbox
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