IRD Second Week: Immediacy and the Ghost of Failure

Yesterday, my teaching day in Santa Fe, marked the end of my second week teaching reading.
This week, I have been thinking about my older students, particularly those who have difficulties with reading.




In my dealings with students, I have noticed a marked contrast between the enthusiastic, look-what-I-can-do attitudes of the younger students (even the shy ones) and an attitude of discomfort and resistance in the middle and high school students.





Part of that difference is, I am sure, the sense of terminal coolness that American teens feel obligated to project. That accounts for the quieter room, and the uneasy glances these students direct to the opposite sex, and to me, the "old lady" invading what would otherwise be TeenSpace. But what I am observing in some of my slower readers is deeper than that. It is a sense of failure that dogs their efforts and fuels their resistance to working towards improvement.

As I was talking with my supervisor the other day, I realized that they have been taught to see themselves as failures in school. Now, before the AFT and NEA come after me, I want to clarify! I am not saying that teachers have actually called these kids failures to their faces, though I would not be suprised if some have. What I am saying is that the way we teach in the public k-12 schools today teaching many students to see themselves as failures.


I believe this sense of inadequacy has roots in two ideas; one of which we teach inadvertently and one that underlies our entire culture of learning in the United States.
I will address the last part first.


American public schooling is modeled on Prussian schooling (I refuse to call it education!) that was developed in the 19th century. The purpose of the Prussian model was to inculcate a student's sense of place in the social heirarchy by training in a rather deterministic way. The vast majority of school-children in Prussia were to be trained to work and obey their betters, who received a real education in separate schools. In the United States, we followed this model in the name of education, ostensibly to teach the unwashed, immigrant masses to be a good and obedient workforce. However, this model never had quite the same results as in Prussia, because Americans also carried the Jeffersonian ideal of an educated, civic-minded populace responsible for reigning in government and enjoying rights protected by the Constitution.


Nevertheless, in American education, as in the American populace in general, the idea that educational success is due more to native ability than to hard work has become entrenched.
(This is, oddly enough, not the case in modern, western Germany, where hard work and discipline receive more credit for educational success). What this means where the rubber meets the road is that students who are not immediately successful in school begin to see themselves as unable to succeed, and give up, resisting attempts by teachers and parents to help them through other instructional methods.


In the culture of American education, we inadvertently reinforce this notion of some "congenital" propensity to failure among otherwise normally intelligent children by nurturing and rewarding immediate success above long-term growth in knowledge. We do this by how grades are calculated and by how we view struggle in learning. We tend to equate lack of struggle and immediate good test results with success, at the expense of rewarding success that come with struggle and hard work. In so doing, we teach students that education means the ability to put the one right answer in blank rather than the ability to ask good questions and solve problems.


NOTE to Classical Education Yeckies: I am not disparaging the learning of facts. They are an important and indispensible part of the background required for reasoning. I am suggesting that the mere ability to spout facts does not an educated person make. Children must be taught background (facts, known information, developed concepts) and reasoning (the ability to manipulate previously aquired knowledge in order to understand patterns of thought within a discipline).


In so doing, we have taught the students that there is an immediate right answer that can be bubbled in on a test form, and that it is more valuable to be able to immediately put the right answer in the blank than it is to work doggedly on a problem, making and correcting numerous mistakes, in order to arrive at a successful solution.


By these criteria, Thomas Edison was a failure.
Remember him? The inventor of the lightbulb who said that it's discovery was 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration?

We need to think about how we view struggle and hard work when we are teaching our children. Yes, there is much in the early stages of learning to read that is fun and, for many kids, painless. But there does come a point where the child must practice decoding even though it is slow, in order to gain facility with reading that will become automatic.

For our older kids, those who are already convinced that they are failures, it is much harder but definitely worthwhile for use to talk to them about their struggles and express confidence in their ability to be finally successful. But since it did not come easily to them at the beginning, we now must expend more efforts overcoming their resistance.

Just remember, though, that this is resistance we have taught them.

I often hear smug adults critizing young people about their propensity towards immediate results and immediate rewards.


I want to respond by saying: "What do you expect? We taught them to measure success this way."


And more, this reflection becomes reason number 257 for why I am glad that I have homeschooled my kid.