I watched Bella as she sat quietly at her desk, looking at nothing I could perceive. She had done nothing in my class during the first quarter. I knew it was not just my History class, she was like this in all of her classes. It was almost time for report cards and I was discouraged that nothing I said, nothing I did could penetrate the armor she put on each morning before she came to school. I thought I would try another tact, “Bella, what are your parents going to say when you come home with all Fs on your report card?”
She looked at me in a way that spoke to her lack of emotion and replied, “They can make me go to school, but they can’t make me learn anything, can they?”
In my 31 years of teaching I encountered many Bellas, children traumatized by going to school. I did not love going to school, the same with many of my friends. However, I was not traumatized by the experience in the way that Bella was. Why do children choose to follow a gang leader rather than a teacher. What are schools doing that make them such a terrible place for some of the children in America?
Perhaps a clue lies with another problem I had as a teacher. I taught U.S. and World History to 15-18 year old high school students. Part of my class included testing. Those terrible evaluations that teachers use to prove how little their students learned over a period of time. I always included some type of question that required a written response. I was always amazed at the number of students who did not even attempt to answer reply to those questions. It was usually the same student who did not participate in class discussions nor particularly care what grade they received. It was the same symptom Bella displayed.
It is important to understand that not all students shut down like Bella, but I believe most students feel this way, even many who thrive at school. Students like Bella are sending a powerful message to all of us. Something is not right in our education system and they are the first to let us know.
So, what do we do, we label them, put them in special programs, take away privileges, demean, tutor, and provide all manner of treatment that seems to cause the disease of hating school to spread. It is a virus that has gone viral in our schools. Today we are holding the entire education system hostage until these students perform at 100%.
It seems that society has turned against it’s young, demanding that they be ready to solve the problems we have caused. Somehow our method of making this happens seems convoluted. We continue to do more of the same, pouring knowledge into the brains of our poor canaries expecting them to sing upon demand, and sing better than all the other canaries. We place them under great stress by expecting everyone to perform in the same way.
In one respect Bella was wrong. She didn’t realize she couldn’t not learn.
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