Excellence

Today in class I was observing students writing a test and my mind started to wander. I've been thinking a lot lately about the cultural difference here and the level of expectation that students have placed upon them here. I recently read the famous "Tiger Mother" article by Amy Chua about her demands on her daughters and how Chinese mothers expect more from their children and how she believes that this is why their children attain such levels of excellence.

I've been thinking about the difference in what is expected of students here and I can see how students strive for the best in many aspects of their lives. My drama club students rehearse their play and then sit down afterwards to critique the piece and the minutiae of their performances. When they ask me how they did, they don't just want to hear me say "Good!" they want to hear me rip apart each part of what they have done and give them areas to improve on. It's been a learning curve from our culture of building self esteem and trying to help kids like themselves that we have in Canada but I kind of wonder if this system doesn't end up building self esteem in a different way.

When you are able to criticize a student's work and have them accept and acknowledge the criticism they are showing maturity and a dedication to improvement. It's not enough to be told that you are doing a good job because that is ambiguous and doesn't give them the room to grow and develop what they are doing. When a student is given a criticism and they take it and work on it and use it to improve what they are doing they build character and show discipline. At the end of the next time you see their performance you can see a marked difference and I can see every time I watch their play ways that they have taken criticism and actually made changes and strides to make the parts better. At the end of SYF on Wednesday I know that the performance that these kids put up was the product of hours of work and lots of concrete improvements on their part. That is something that they can really be proud of. And it's not as ambiguous as just going up there and doing a good job because of some intangible element of who they are, it's that they have worked hard at what they do.

 I remember in either first year or second year of DRED talking about how I think that the idea of a self fulfilling prophecy is really true in education. That when you go into a class of students who are identified as not being able to do whatever because they have X Y and Z learning disabilities and you treat them like they can't, then they won't. If you expect them to do better, or even if you don't know that they have X Y and Z, I've often found that they can rise to a higher standard because you expect that they can. Obviously, this isn't a magic bean that makes everyone capable but I do think that the expectations of a person play a huge role in what they end up being able to do. I've often cited that as a reason that I think streaming kids can be very harmful because it tells a segment of people that they just can't. So they often don't. Conversely, in Asia, the expectations are extremely high. We worry so much in North America and the West that we will harm students by being demanding, that we will ruin their sense of self worth if we drive them hard. But, maybe we are telling them that we don't think they can be driven hard and in that process, by not expecting and demanding more of them, we show them that they can't.

Obviously, I am in a school right now where I am working with students who inherently can. They are students who have been selected and streamed for their entire lives to get them into this place in this school and a lot of that is based on their abilities and the tests they have written up until now. I don't know what happens to students here if they have a learning disability because I've asked a bunch of people and they have either said that students who have learning disabilities don't come to the kind of school I teach at so I don't have to worry, or that other people in the school deal with those issues so I don't have to worry or it's been vaguely mentioned that a student here and there might have autism, or ADHD but I don't know who they are or how you find that out. They don't have IEPs here, and I don't have any assigned classes yet so I don't know what kind of profiles for students I will have access to.

No system is perfect but it's been interesting to see the differences here and what students strive for has so far been very impressive. I'll get back to you when I have a better idea of what their self esteems are like.