Teaching Or Learning?
Memoirs of a small, private school established for kids with learning differences.
Everyone can learn!
We MERELY have minds THAT ARE WIRED DIFFERENTLY....
The Beginning
Identical twin girls. Sixth-graders, with long, strawberry blonde hair, piercing blue eyes, and giant smiles. They were asked to please not return to the school. They were too hard to handle, which really meant, as I was soon to discover, that they questioned everything. Their frantic parents came to me for help since I had recently been successful in maintaining their interest during swimming lessons and they were seeing a difference in the girls’ attitude toward learning. Kate and Liz’s parents had decided that since the girls had been willing to follow my rigorous schedule during swimming classes that I must have some sort of secret weapon to make them do what they were told.
“So what seems to be the problem, girls?” I asked in a friendly conversational manner to break the ice for our first session together. As they looked at each other I could tell that they were wondering if it was safe to be truthful or if being honest would get them into trouble again.
“School sucks! The teachers are so stupid at that school. They want us to be quiet, and be still, and do things their way. If I ask a question, or I want to discuss something, they get mad! They insist that we don’t have time for that.
They sat I am interrupting!”
In the following weeks of working with the girls, I was stumped as to why they were not being successful academically. They were so bright that at times I was actually intimidated. They aced every mental challenge set before them and asked for more.
The school they had been attending was considered the best in the city so I was naturally wondering why the teachers were struggling with students as bright as these twins. I began asking questions. Their school psychologist gave me the answer. I knew this school had policies regarding academic testing, since I had been a teacher there in the past, so I asked for their scores on the intelligence tests. I was not surprised to see that their scores were in the gifted range. One of them even landed in the exceptional range, which explained a lot of her questioning attitude toward authoritative decisions. Were they so bright that they were too much of a challenge for their teachers?
“How did the girls react when you gave them their scores?” I asked the school psychologist.
“Oh, no, we never divulge the results to the students.” She responded in a matter- of-fact fashion.
Our archaic school system continuously smothers curiosity, creativity, self-development, and a child’s natural love of learning. “It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education,” is how Albert Einstein put it.
As one of the founders of the American public school system, John Dewey believed in child-centered education. He believed that our society was damaging the individual and that schools were needed to nurture and repair them. He wrote, “We shall find great difficulty in encouraging freedom, independence, and initiative in every sphere of social life, while perpetuating in the school dependence upon external authority. The forces of the social life are already encroaching upon the school institutions which we have inherited from the past, so that many of its mainstays are crumbling. Unless the outcome is to be chaotic, we must take hold of the organic, positive principle involved in democracy, and put that in entire possession of the spirit and work of the school.”
That was in 1902!
Why are we dismayed when students rebel when forced to be cookie-cutter kids? Why do we continue to support this industrialist approach that all students must shoot out the end of the machine in programmed fashion, ready and willing to be workers in the factories our society uses to perpetuate a consumerist lifestyle? Why not focus instead on identifying the strengths in each child and then guiding them toward initiatives that will allow them to become the people they were meant to be instead of who we think they should be? Why do we continue to use approaches that extinguish their natural love of learning?
We pay a high price when we punish students because they learn differently from the method a teacher has chosen to employ. We label those who do not conform to our idea of how students should learn instead of allowing them to use their strengths in the learning process. These creative minds are barraged daily with clichés like:
“You could do better if you tried.”
“You just don’t care.”
“You’re just lazy.”
Each child’s mind is wired differently and it is time we began paying attention to these unique abilities. Children who ask questions are punished and labeled as defiant. Children who need physical movement to process ideas are labeled as hyperactive and given medication to keep them still so they won’t disrupt the lesson. Children who have reading problems or who process language differently fall through the cracks because legislature requires schools to focus on completing an established curriculum instead of focusing on the needs of each student. Children are labeled as behavior problems and expelled from school because they are not allowed to be responsible for their own learning, to learn at their own pace, and to learn things that are of interest to them.
Our society no longer needs children to be molded into factory workers, which was the basis of the beginning of our current educational structure. We need children who understand themselves, who understand how they learn, who know how to learn and how to think. We need to coach our students to come up with new ideas that will keep them afloat when faced with constant changes in their fast-paced world.
Let’s create a place where doors are finally opened to ALL children, where they are accepted for who they are and which allows them to learn the way THEY learn. Let's create a place where doors are finally opened to ALL children. A place where they are accepted for who they are and which demystifies for them the way THEY learn and why they have difficulties with certain types of learning situations.
Memoirs of a small, private school established for kids with learning differences.
Everyone can learn!
We MERELY have minds THAT ARE WIRED DIFFERENTLY....
The Beginning
Identical twin girls. Sixth-graders, with long, strawberry blonde hair, piercing blue eyes, and giant smiles. They were asked to please not return to the school. They were too hard to handle, which really meant, as I was soon to discover, that they questioned everything. Their frantic parents came to me for help since I had recently been successful in maintaining their interest during swimming lessons and they were seeing a difference in the girls’ attitude toward learning. Kate and Liz’s parents had decided that since the girls had been willing to follow my rigorous schedule during swimming classes that I must have some sort of secret weapon to make them do what they were told.
“So what seems to be the problem, girls?” I asked in a friendly conversational manner to break the ice for our first session together. As they looked at each other I could tell that they were wondering if it was safe to be truthful or if being honest would get them into trouble again.
“School sucks! The teachers are so stupid at that school. They want us to be quiet, and be still, and do things their way. If I ask a question, or I want to discuss something, they get mad! They insist that we don’t have time for that.
They sat I am interrupting!”
In the following weeks of working with the girls, I was stumped as to why they were not being successful academically. They were so bright that at times I was actually intimidated. They aced every mental challenge set before them and asked for more.
The school they had been attending was considered the best in the city so I was naturally wondering why the teachers were struggling with students as bright as these twins. I began asking questions. Their school psychologist gave me the answer. I knew this school had policies regarding academic testing, since I had been a teacher there in the past, so I asked for their scores on the intelligence tests. I was not surprised to see that their scores were in the gifted range. One of them even landed in the exceptional range, which explained a lot of her questioning attitude toward authoritative decisions. Were they so bright that they were too much of a challenge for their teachers?
“How did the girls react when you gave them their scores?” I asked the school psychologist.
“Oh, no, we never divulge the results to the students.” She responded in a matter- of-fact fashion.
Our archaic school system continuously smothers curiosity, creativity, self-development, and a child’s natural love of learning. “It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education,” is how Albert Einstein put it.
As one of the founders of the American public school system, John Dewey believed in child-centered education. He believed that our society was damaging the individual and that schools were needed to nurture and repair them. He wrote, “We shall find great difficulty in encouraging freedom, independence, and initiative in every sphere of social life, while perpetuating in the school dependence upon external authority. The forces of the social life are already encroaching upon the school institutions which we have inherited from the past, so that many of its mainstays are crumbling. Unless the outcome is to be chaotic, we must take hold of the organic, positive principle involved in democracy, and put that in entire possession of the spirit and work of the school.”
That was in 1902!
Why are we dismayed when students rebel when forced to be cookie-cutter kids? Why do we continue to support this industrialist approach that all students must shoot out the end of the machine in programmed fashion, ready and willing to be workers in the factories our society uses to perpetuate a consumerist lifestyle? Why not focus instead on identifying the strengths in each child and then guiding them toward initiatives that will allow them to become the people they were meant to be instead of who we think they should be? Why do we continue to use approaches that extinguish their natural love of learning?
We pay a high price when we punish students because they learn differently from the method a teacher has chosen to employ. We label those who do not conform to our idea of how students should learn instead of allowing them to use their strengths in the learning process. These creative minds are barraged daily with clichés like:
“You could do better if you tried.”
“You just don’t care.”
“You’re just lazy.”
Each child’s mind is wired differently and it is time we began paying attention to these unique abilities. Children who ask questions are punished and labeled as defiant. Children who need physical movement to process ideas are labeled as hyperactive and given medication to keep them still so they won’t disrupt the lesson. Children who have reading problems or who process language differently fall through the cracks because legislature requires schools to focus on completing an established curriculum instead of focusing on the needs of each student. Children are labeled as behavior problems and expelled from school because they are not allowed to be responsible for their own learning, to learn at their own pace, and to learn things that are of interest to them.
Our society no longer needs children to be molded into factory workers, which was the basis of the beginning of our current educational structure. We need children who understand themselves, who understand how they learn, who know how to learn and how to think. We need to coach our students to come up with new ideas that will keep them afloat when faced with constant changes in their fast-paced world.
Let’s create a place where doors are finally opened to ALL children, where they are accepted for who they are and which allows them to learn the way THEY learn. Let's create a place where doors are finally opened to ALL children. A place where they are accepted for who they are and which demystifies for them the way THEY learn and why they have difficulties with certain types of learning situations.