thoughts on school
Dec. 7th, 2010 01:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Competence is not a straight line.
I have no particular reason to post about this right now. But it's something I've thought about a lot before, and it's in my head today, so...
My first primary school seemed to think that competence was a point. (Which they were wrong about, by the way.)
They had a list of Stuff That Grade 2 Kids Can Do, and they assumed that all the kids in Grade 2 were at the same level. Hence my mother having to fight tooth and nail to get them to realise that WE COULD ALREADY READ. NO REALLY. STOP TRYING TO TEACH MY KIDS THE ALPHABET, AND LET THEM READ NOVELS.
My second school was much better: they thought that competence was a line. (Which was an improvement over school 1 - but they were still wrong.)
In the middle of the line are all the average kids, who are at the standard level for their age group.
On one end are the stupid kids, who need remedial help.
On the other end are the clever kids, who need extension activities.
I was a clever kid. I needed extension activities. And my school, being helpful, provided me with plenty of extension activities, extra-tricky maths, extra-awesome reading, and so forth.
What they didn't realise was that I needed remedial help.
I was a clever kid. I was at the top end of the line; clearly I couldn't be at the bottom end too.
So very logical. So very blind.
This is how I got through 13 years of school without a single teacher realising that I didn't know how to do homework, or how to do assignments, or how to study. Not one teacher realised that competency is not a straight line, and that it is perfectly possible to be very very clever and also in desperate need of remedial help.
I'm still rather annoyed about that.
I have no particular reason to post about this right now. But it's something I've thought about a lot before, and it's in my head today, so...
My first primary school seemed to think that competence was a point. (Which they were wrong about, by the way.)
They had a list of Stuff That Grade 2 Kids Can Do, and they assumed that all the kids in Grade 2 were at the same level. Hence my mother having to fight tooth and nail to get them to realise that WE COULD ALREADY READ. NO REALLY. STOP TRYING TO TEACH MY KIDS THE ALPHABET, AND LET THEM READ NOVELS.
My second school was much better: they thought that competence was a line. (Which was an improvement over school 1 - but they were still wrong.)
In the middle of the line are all the average kids, who are at the standard level for their age group.
On one end are the stupid kids, who need remedial help.
On the other end are the clever kids, who need extension activities.
I was a clever kid. I needed extension activities. And my school, being helpful, provided me with plenty of extension activities, extra-tricky maths, extra-awesome reading, and so forth.
What they didn't realise was that I needed remedial help.
I was a clever kid. I was at the top end of the line; clearly I couldn't be at the bottom end too.
So very logical. So very blind.
This is how I got through 13 years of school without a single teacher realising that I didn't know how to do homework, or how to do assignments, or how to study. Not one teacher realised that competency is not a straight line, and that it is perfectly possible to be very very clever and also in desperate need of remedial help.
I'm still rather annoyed about that.
no subject
Date: 2010-12-07 02:28 am (UTC)Gabrielle
no subject
Date: 2010-12-07 03:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-07 03:04 am (UTC)She once wrote a brilliant essay, and got a D-minus for it - because clearly, as a remedial student, she must have copied it from somewhere. *fumes* I ended up storming in and yelling at the teacher - and I was a good student, so my word could be trusted where hers couldn't...
Schools suck, a lot of the time.
no subject
Date: 2010-12-07 05:46 am (UTC)My parents did get me into remedial programs (KUMON for English, a maths club after school in primary school, etc). I was also recommended for those "gifted" programs by my teachers. Unfortunately, this didn't really carry over into secondary school (apart from a science extension program in yr7, which kinda rocked) and I was, to a great deal, left to my own devices.
I think the best thing my school did for me was to not allow me into the accellerated maths program and to completely steam-roll my mother when she tried to insist that I should be there.
Yes, I was smart enough to be there. Fortunately, my maths teachers were aware that I would not have coped. They also gave up their lunch times to provide extra help to students, which I took advantage of occasionally.
I was also fortunate enough to have a friend who was very, very organised! So we'd share the research, I'd fix up all the English (she was ESL) and she'd figure out how to present the damned thing :-p
As a teacher, it can be hard to figure things like that out. I do tend to try very hard to focus on how my students go about doing things, but it's not easy. In a normal setting, you have 25-30 kids whose individual needs you need to try to be aware of and cater for, and in a secondary school you might see them for an hour or two per day. It's a flawed system as far as getting to know the students, particularly if they are shy as you just don't get to have those conversations with them as often as you should.
I'm lucky that, this year, I have the same groups for both maths and science so I was able to build up some relationships where I could give them tips for test technique and study habits, even in a group of 50.
It's still hard though, mostly because I still don't know how I study best, let alone how someone else might as my mother thought that there was only one way to study and learn. I just know a few bits and pieces of good advice which I can thank my own teachers for, and I'm still trying to build on that knowledge.
no subject
Date: 2010-12-07 07:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-07 07:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-07 09:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-07 01:08 pm (UTC)My daughter, one of the best students in her year at school, had only a 'low-side of average' reading speed and both school and S2C and I really didn't do much to help her speed up - everyone just assumed that the more she read the faster she'd get. Then she found she couldn't keep up with the reading schedule for her History degree and had to learn new techniques at that point.
no subject
Date: 2010-12-07 01:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-08 05:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-08 04:30 am (UTC)I remember back when Aaron was in 8th grade, his English class had both the parents and the kids read the same book. They then had a discussion with both the parents and the kids about the book. My husband is the one who read the book and attended the discussion. When he came home, he told there was one kid who was disruptive, kept calling out things and was a general pain. Then there was this other kid who had these amazing insights into the book -much more advanced than all the other kids.
Both kids, of course, were Aaron. Not suprisingly, we used to get phone calls about him constantly. But after the complaints, they'd end it with "but he's so bright that in the long run he'll be fine." Huh? Then don't call me to complain.
Fortunately Aaron was able to figure out how to study once he got to college since I don't think he ever really bothered prior to that.
no subject
Date: 2010-12-08 11:16 am (UTC)And then found myself very close to failing year 11 Maths because I was totally unable to understand the work. I'd been memorising and rote learning Maths since Primary school, and by year 11 that just didn't work any more. You needed to understand how to do the work, and I didn't have a clue how you went about that.
No teacher ever picked it up or explained it to me.
no subject
Date: 2010-12-09 11:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-03-02 12:51 am (UTC)I thank my parents for getting me into accelerated math (4 years of HS level math in 2). It's the only class that required me to have any study skills (beyond cramming and spitting information back out) while I was in junior high and high school. If I hadn't done that, I might have ended up flunking out of college, because my small town school system did not teach me how to study.
(And I got very bored and developed something of an attitude problem because of that. For example, my junior high English teacher told me "you're obviously not putting any effort into this class" and my smart-aleck answer was "why should I, I'm getting an A". Which was true, but about as disrespectful as I could get without actually swearing at her.)