Unintentional Lessons
Aug. 3rd, 2005 12:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
omorkaOkay, so the workshop I went to today was called "Motivating Students Who Don't Care." That, by the way, is one of the two Big Problems of public education in a district like mine. If we can get the students to care about their own achievement, even somewhat, the vast majority of our full-time problems evaporate and we can worry about other important issues like language issues, gifted education, and the AP program. (The other Big Problem is the standardized testing system and the vast and stinking accumulation of cruft that comes with it. The two are complexly interrelated.)
The workshop, as previously mentioned, sucked. It was presented by one of the district's "Safe and Drug-Free Schools Initiative" administrators. This particular one is not insane - she's the only one who doesn't automatically list "sex" as one of the Grave Dangers To Our Youth along with gangs, violence, and crack - but I'm not impressed by her despite that. She reinforced my lack of being impressed by using her lifelong struggle with mathematics as one of her examples of the sorts of things that demotivate our students. (I asked her later why it is that people who present workshops always seem to think it's fine to admit struggling with or being bad at math, but I have yet to meet one who admits to struggling with reading or history. To her credit, she came up with an answer: the people who do presentations are those who are comfortable with public speaking, who would tend to be people who are word-people and therefore at least not bad at reading. This does not explain why it's socially okay, even a point of pride, to admit being bad at math, but at least she made a reasonable attempt.) I didn't learn anything at all new during the workshop, but I did end up drawing an analogy that I think I will use the next time someone tries to argue that gifted ed is a luxury, not a necessity:
Imagine, for a moment, a student entering first grade who has never been in school before and comes from a typical environment for our district - lots of TV, not a whole lot of individual parental attention, never been read to, probably doesn't have any books in the house other than the TV listings and a Bible.
A) This hypothetical student enters first grade excited to be going to school - it's a sign of becoming a "big kid," s/he's eager to learn more about the world, plus now s/her has hir own crayons and glue. So s/he is given hir first graded assignment, and s/he works and works and works at it, gives it hir best effort . . . only to have it marked with a U for "unsatisfactory." So s/he tries even harder on the next assignment - with the same results. For hir first two years of formal schooling, hir best efforts are met every time, or almost every time, with failure.
After a couple of years of this, Student A almost invariably stops putting any effort into hir schoolwork. Why should s/he? It's not producing results. If s/he doesn't try, at least the effort isn't invariably wasted in the end. It would be insane to keep on trying, really, since it simply doesn't produce any results.
Student A almost always responds by taking on a label: "I'm stupid. I don't get this. I never will get this. Why should I bother trying?" And thereafter s/he doesn't put forth any significant effort at all.
B) The hypothetical student enters first grade excited to be going to school, etc. So s/he is given hir first graded assignment, and s/he works and works and works at it, gives it hir best effort . . . and gets it marked S for "satisfactory." Well, that's not too bad, right? So s/he tries just as hard on the next assignment . . . and gets the dreaded U. And for the next few years, hir performance is such that on some assignments s/he passes, and on some s/he does not, with approximately equal numbers of successes and failures or slightly more failures.
Now, sometimes Student Bs are stubborn and keep fighting their way through. Bullheadedness can be a virtue. But the more common response is for a Student B to come to the conclusion that, since s/he keeps putting out the same effort each time, and is getting inconsistent results, that there is no causative effect between effort and academic success. S/he develops an entirely external locus of control for hir grades. "Oh, the teacher doesn't like me and she gave me an F." "I got lucky on that test and passed it." "God gave me a good grade on my paper!" Etc. The upshot of this is often that the student loses any motivation to put forth effort, not because it doesn't make any difference, but because that way the student has control over hir grades. S/he feels like s/he has no way to tell whether s/he will pass or not if s/he tries - but if s/he doesn't try, s/he knows that s/he will fail, and that certainty is more tolerable than the out-of-control uncertainty of investing effort. (And s/he will often still blame the teacher for the failure.)
Awful, huh? Now which situation is worse?
If you said B, you're right. It's almost impossible to give a student hir locus of control back once s/he's lost it. Student A may be recoverable, because at some point along the line, some teacher who is paying attention may refer Student A for disability testing. If it turns out that Student A has an identifiable problem, even a semi-bogus one like ADHD, you can change hir self-label from "I'm stupid" to "I have X problem." And if appropriate accommodations or therapy for the problem are offered, the student may finally experience success - and after a couple of years of failure, if the child is resilient, a string of successes can be enough to give hir hir motivation back. "I'm not stupid! If I can work around X problem, I can do this!"
Now consider this third student:
C) The hypothetical student enters first grade excited to be going to school, etc. So s/he is given hir first graded assignment, and s/he works and works and works at it, gives it hir best effort . . . and gets it marked E for "excellent." Yay! Child is happy, parents (if they care at all) are happy, everything is good. Then on some assignment down the line, s/he doesn't put forth hir full effort on an assignment, in fact completes it with an absolute minimum of effort to get it done and turns it in.
And gets the E anyway.
In fact, s/he discovers that s/he can get a very high grade on pretty much any assignment by doing minimal work, simply because hir minimal effort is better than the honest best efforts of much of the class. What does this child learn?
First, Student C gets a label just like Student A does. "I'm smart."
Secondly, and more importantly as far as motivation goes, Student C learns an operational definition of smartness: "I'm smart because I can get good grades without having to work. Therefore, anyone who has to work for hir grades is not smart."
This student is hardly any more motivated than the two students above, but no one notices because s/he's not failing. That's bad in its own right, but even worse is what happens when Child C finally hits a level where s/he is finally required to exert effort to be successful, whenever that happens (be it fourth grade, the beginning of middle school, their first Pre-AP class in high school, or even not until their freshman year at a selective university).
Then, suddenly, performing at only minimal effort isn't working anymore. The student has two options:
i) Student C can decide to buckle down and get to work. This is more difficult than it sounds, because by this point Student C has no idea what appropriate academic effort looks like. Hir grades are likely to dip even if s/he does start putting forth effort, because until s/he gains hir feet, that effort is likely to be poorly focused and not very effective. It's entirely likely that s/he doesn't know how to study, and so ends up cramming for every test because s/he has no other method. Worst of all, though, Student C now thinks "I can't get good grades without working for them anymore. Therefore, I must not be smart anymore." This can seriously fuck with a kid's self-image, especially if it happens in middle school, when most kids' self-images are being fucked to Hel and gone anyway.
ii) Student C can decide to hold onto hir self-image as "smart." S/he continues to not put forth effort, and flounders in the class. To maintain the self-image, now Student C must stop doing any work at all. This will cause hir to fail the class, and s/he knows this, but s/he justifies it with "Oh, I don't care about that class. I don't like the [subject/teacher/textbook/etc.]." It is easier for this version of Student C to choose to fail on hir own terms than it is for hir to hit the books, put forth the effort, and have to lose hir identity as a smart kid. It is better to be thought of as smart and lazy than to be thought of as diligent but not smart.
It so happens that a lot of gifted girls take route (i) and a lot of gifted boys take route (ii). Route (i) is often identified by teachers as "overachieving" - if Student C is having to work so hard, maybe s/he should take the next lower class instead? And route (ii) is almost always identified by teachers as "underachieving" - if Student C would just apply hirself a little bit, surely s/he'd have no trouble with the class, but s/he need to put forth that effort. It's far from a gender lock; some boys do take route (i) and some girls route (ii). But there is a gender correlation.
[Edit for clarification: There are, of course, many students who do not fall into any of these three categories, who may either remain motivated or lose their motivation for other reasons. These are just the three that I've seen most often.]
Anyway, this is one of the big reasons why gifted kids at any level need challenges that meet them at their level, things that are hard enough that they have to struggle and exert significant effort on them, even if they're not part of the regular curriculum. They have to learn that just doing work does not make one "not smart anymore." And for kids like poor Student A up there, the same idea applies - if they're consistently not successful with the regular curriculum, give them something simple enough that if they honestly work at it, they can be successful at it. This does not mean that the teacher has to certify that they've mastered the grade level and pass them on - in fact, I'd much rather they not. But the student has to at least meet with success on some academic tasks, or they'll never master the grade level material at all, because they'll shut down.
Of course, ideas of "appropriate challenge" for an individual student fly in the face of the neatly-boxed grade-level expectations of the standardized testing system . . . but that's another rant altogether.
The workshop, as previously mentioned, sucked. It was presented by one of the district's "Safe and Drug-Free Schools Initiative" administrators. This particular one is not insane - she's the only one who doesn't automatically list "sex" as one of the Grave Dangers To Our Youth along with gangs, violence, and crack - but I'm not impressed by her despite that. She reinforced my lack of being impressed by using her lifelong struggle with mathematics as one of her examples of the sorts of things that demotivate our students. (I asked her later why it is that people who present workshops always seem to think it's fine to admit struggling with or being bad at math, but I have yet to meet one who admits to struggling with reading or history. To her credit, she came up with an answer: the people who do presentations are those who are comfortable with public speaking, who would tend to be people who are word-people and therefore at least not bad at reading. This does not explain why it's socially okay, even a point of pride, to admit being bad at math, but at least she made a reasonable attempt.) I didn't learn anything at all new during the workshop, but I did end up drawing an analogy that I think I will use the next time someone tries to argue that gifted ed is a luxury, not a necessity:
Imagine, for a moment, a student entering first grade who has never been in school before and comes from a typical environment for our district - lots of TV, not a whole lot of individual parental attention, never been read to, probably doesn't have any books in the house other than the TV listings and a Bible.
A) This hypothetical student enters first grade excited to be going to school - it's a sign of becoming a "big kid," s/he's eager to learn more about the world, plus now s/her has hir own crayons and glue. So s/he is given hir first graded assignment, and s/he works and works and works at it, gives it hir best effort . . . only to have it marked with a U for "unsatisfactory." So s/he tries even harder on the next assignment - with the same results. For hir first two years of formal schooling, hir best efforts are met every time, or almost every time, with failure.
After a couple of years of this, Student A almost invariably stops putting any effort into hir schoolwork. Why should s/he? It's not producing results. If s/he doesn't try, at least the effort isn't invariably wasted in the end. It would be insane to keep on trying, really, since it simply doesn't produce any results.
Student A almost always responds by taking on a label: "I'm stupid. I don't get this. I never will get this. Why should I bother trying?" And thereafter s/he doesn't put forth any significant effort at all.
B) The hypothetical student enters first grade excited to be going to school, etc. So s/he is given hir first graded assignment, and s/he works and works and works at it, gives it hir best effort . . . and gets it marked S for "satisfactory." Well, that's not too bad, right? So s/he tries just as hard on the next assignment . . . and gets the dreaded U. And for the next few years, hir performance is such that on some assignments s/he passes, and on some s/he does not, with approximately equal numbers of successes and failures or slightly more failures.
Now, sometimes Student Bs are stubborn and keep fighting their way through. Bullheadedness can be a virtue. But the more common response is for a Student B to come to the conclusion that, since s/he keeps putting out the same effort each time, and is getting inconsistent results, that there is no causative effect between effort and academic success. S/he develops an entirely external locus of control for hir grades. "Oh, the teacher doesn't like me and she gave me an F." "I got lucky on that test and passed it." "God gave me a good grade on my paper!" Etc. The upshot of this is often that the student loses any motivation to put forth effort, not because it doesn't make any difference, but because that way the student has control over hir grades. S/he feels like s/he has no way to tell whether s/he will pass or not if s/he tries - but if s/he doesn't try, s/he knows that s/he will fail, and that certainty is more tolerable than the out-of-control uncertainty of investing effort. (And s/he will often still blame the teacher for the failure.)
Awful, huh? Now which situation is worse?
If you said B, you're right. It's almost impossible to give a student hir locus of control back once s/he's lost it. Student A may be recoverable, because at some point along the line, some teacher who is paying attention may refer Student A for disability testing. If it turns out that Student A has an identifiable problem, even a semi-bogus one like ADHD, you can change hir self-label from "I'm stupid" to "I have X problem." And if appropriate accommodations or therapy for the problem are offered, the student may finally experience success - and after a couple of years of failure, if the child is resilient, a string of successes can be enough to give hir hir motivation back. "I'm not stupid! If I can work around X problem, I can do this!"
Now consider this third student:
C) The hypothetical student enters first grade excited to be going to school, etc. So s/he is given hir first graded assignment, and s/he works and works and works at it, gives it hir best effort . . . and gets it marked E for "excellent." Yay! Child is happy, parents (if they care at all) are happy, everything is good. Then on some assignment down the line, s/he doesn't put forth hir full effort on an assignment, in fact completes it with an absolute minimum of effort to get it done and turns it in.
And gets the E anyway.
In fact, s/he discovers that s/he can get a very high grade on pretty much any assignment by doing minimal work, simply because hir minimal effort is better than the honest best efforts of much of the class. What does this child learn?
First, Student C gets a label just like Student A does. "I'm smart."
Secondly, and more importantly as far as motivation goes, Student C learns an operational definition of smartness: "I'm smart because I can get good grades without having to work. Therefore, anyone who has to work for hir grades is not smart."
This student is hardly any more motivated than the two students above, but no one notices because s/he's not failing. That's bad in its own right, but even worse is what happens when Child C finally hits a level where s/he is finally required to exert effort to be successful, whenever that happens (be it fourth grade, the beginning of middle school, their first Pre-AP class in high school, or even not until their freshman year at a selective university).
Then, suddenly, performing at only minimal effort isn't working anymore. The student has two options:
i) Student C can decide to buckle down and get to work. This is more difficult than it sounds, because by this point Student C has no idea what appropriate academic effort looks like. Hir grades are likely to dip even if s/he does start putting forth effort, because until s/he gains hir feet, that effort is likely to be poorly focused and not very effective. It's entirely likely that s/he doesn't know how to study, and so ends up cramming for every test because s/he has no other method. Worst of all, though, Student C now thinks "I can't get good grades without working for them anymore. Therefore, I must not be smart anymore." This can seriously fuck with a kid's self-image, especially if it happens in middle school, when most kids' self-images are being fucked to Hel and gone anyway.
ii) Student C can decide to hold onto hir self-image as "smart." S/he continues to not put forth effort, and flounders in the class. To maintain the self-image, now Student C must stop doing any work at all. This will cause hir to fail the class, and s/he knows this, but s/he justifies it with "Oh, I don't care about that class. I don't like the [subject/teacher/textbook/etc.]." It is easier for this version of Student C to choose to fail on hir own terms than it is for hir to hit the books, put forth the effort, and have to lose hir identity as a smart kid. It is better to be thought of as smart and lazy than to be thought of as diligent but not smart.
It so happens that a lot of gifted girls take route (i) and a lot of gifted boys take route (ii). Route (i) is often identified by teachers as "overachieving" - if Student C is having to work so hard, maybe s/he should take the next lower class instead? And route (ii) is almost always identified by teachers as "underachieving" - if Student C would just apply hirself a little bit, surely s/he'd have no trouble with the class, but s/he need to put forth that effort. It's far from a gender lock; some boys do take route (i) and some girls route (ii). But there is a gender correlation.
[Edit for clarification: There are, of course, many students who do not fall into any of these three categories, who may either remain motivated or lose their motivation for other reasons. These are just the three that I've seen most often.]
Anyway, this is one of the big reasons why gifted kids at any level need challenges that meet them at their level, things that are hard enough that they have to struggle and exert significant effort on them, even if they're not part of the regular curriculum. They have to learn that just doing work does not make one "not smart anymore." And for kids like poor Student A up there, the same idea applies - if they're consistently not successful with the regular curriculum, give them something simple enough that if they honestly work at it, they can be successful at it. This does not mean that the teacher has to certify that they've mastered the grade level and pass them on - in fact, I'd much rather they not. But the student has to at least meet with success on some academic tasks, or they'll never master the grade level material at all, because they'll shut down.
Of course, ideas of "appropriate challenge" for an individual student fly in the face of the neatly-boxed grade-level expectations of the standardized testing system . . . but that's another rant altogether.
