I’m conflicted on the role of a teacher for social intervention. Two relevant stories come to mind;
I’m teaching a biology 11 class, and there is this grade 10 student in it. She is brilliant. She works hard, is friendly but honestly her relentlessness rubbed me the wrong way. We had planned a unit test for evolution and she obtained a near perfect score, something like 97%. Now, to me this is an amazing score and should be celebrated, but to her, nothing under 100 was acceptable.
My coaching teacher at the time had policy that students could redo and re-write any assignment or test. I had observed how some teachers handle this; with binders in multiple colours, allowing students the choice to redo anything at anytime, lunch afterschool early morning… and to me that was unacceptable so I told the class that all re-writes had to be on Thursday (two days after the initial).
This young lady wrote the test again, and scored her 100%, but I was seriously concerned for her, on the one hand, she aced the test, on the other, she had been concerned about other courses she needed to catch up on and I wish that she had taken the two biology blocks to work on math or physics. Maybe it’s better that she focused on biology in those blocks.
Thursday night was parent-teacher night and my student inquired if I’d be present. I told her I would be but she informed me the opposite. She didn’t want us “gossiping about her” and she laughed it off. In this moment, a week’s worth of reflection needed to be shared. I told her the following “Doug, you’re an amazing student and you will succeed where ever you go, but, I’m concerned that you need to dial it back. You’re top of your class and I just want you to know if you achieved lower we would still be proud of you. I want you to know that at some point you’ll have a harder time, score lower and that you are still exceptional”. I wonder if it was an over step, and am thankful that I didn’t see her mother at PT that night. She made me a plush Evee in the above photo so I must have made some kind of positive impact.
