Too many snowflakes make an avalanche

And for a teacher already snowed under, an unexpected encounter with a motivational speaker allowed her see the snowplow she never noticed before — quit catering to kids who won’t try.

had I heard that message years ago, it would have helped with my teaching. For a long time, I thought that it was my responsibility — in some form or fashion — to “move the rock” for my students whenever they were not performing well in class. If they were challenged to complete assignments on time, or if they didn’t perform well on assignments, I, like most of my colleagues, would cut them slack and give extensions or permit rewrites. If their motivation was insufficient, I worked even harder to make my classes more interesting. I’d go to the teaching workshops. I agreed to follow Student Services’ advice to redesign assignments so that literally everyone enrolled in my classes — qualified or not — could succeed. Mid-semester, I would inevitably feel like I was doing ten times more work than they were. In fact, I was doing considerably more work than the students were.

As a student, I deserved every crappy mark I ever got. I never blamed anything but my own apathy when I handed in poorly written work, incomplete assignments or did inadequate studying for tests. I also deserved every excellent mark I got because I worked for them. It was so much easier to do the work whenever I loved the class, of course.

Sure, there are stories of great teachers who change the world for their kids, and others where only one kid sees how great the teacher is and they both benefit by some oddball tutoring. But too many stories are like the ones I’ve quoted above. Generations of kids have been raised in a gimme world where hard work never has to pay off because doing nothing results in the same rewards.

I’m glad I washed out of teaching. I think if I had to let kids pass when they hadn’t learned everything they’d need for the following years, I would have felt like quitting anyway. Yes, it’d be great if every aspiring teacher worked as hard to inspire students as this woman did – especially if it paid off.

But when all that work doesn’t pay off? How can anyone expect kids to learn how to deal with life’s challenges if we never let them experience any?

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Unrelated but interesting to me – a study done to determine how many college students lose religion led to interesting results. Those who went into biology and some other sciences didn’t lose much in the way of god-belief. Education courses are apparently a major haven for religious folks and for people like me who turned out to prefer social sciences instead (thank the maker of fine macaroni) usually wind up with the least faith of them all. More about that here.