Sounds like you’re saying that if everyone and everything in a student’s life agrees that the student is smart, they’ll believe it themselves and be smart, but if everyone and everything in a student’s life agrees that the student is stupid, they’ll believe it and be stupid…and there’s no middle ground between those two options.
Except that virtually every student lives somewhere between those two extremes. Family is supportive but school isn’t, or a teacher is supportive but the principal is a jerk, or everyone in the student’s life believes in the student but every show on TV tells them they’re never good enough…so how is that the fault of the parents, exactly?
Not at all. In fact I am the last person who believes in either/or - black/white scenarios. We were talking about priming which I believe plays a factor. Of course some times all it take is one person to believe in another for them to succeed, and some times that person can believe in them selves and succeed, and some time there are golden children destined for greatness but turn into total fuck ups.
But as others pointed out, priming can affect people.
Most kids who struggle at school do so primarily because school is inflexible. Conventional education pretends that all kids need to learn the same things at the same times and in the same ways. This is as demonstrably incorrect as young-Earth creationism, and yet it provides the framework for the way that most kids experience education.
I think that once we start to treat kids as the individuals they are, once we allow them to experience education as something they collaborate on instead of something that is imposed upon them via authoritarianism, most of these imaginary “gaps” (imaginary because they’re based on completely arbitrary goals) will disappear.
[quote=“mcolleen206, post:3, topic:67505”]
. . . this is how I have been taught to deal with the word gap: teaching parents to talk to their children, engage them in discussion, read to them. Yes, I agree that this should happen in schools as well as in the home, but the information I have about the word gap problem has all been toward fixing this before school starts, which is why this article bothers me just a bit . . .[/quote]
Yeah, this. I’ve never pictured solving the word gap as a thing for schools to fix, and the assumption that it is seems to have been turned into an excuse for axe-grinding.
Classes for adults, high-quality pre-school play and enrichment sessions for the tots.
(And nutritional support programs, and health care. If only because some twit will take the excuse for not mentioning these as an excuse to move the goal posts.)
