So when I went through school you’d have two types of struggling kids:
Kid A would struggle to pass tests, but work hard and get every assignment done so they can keep their average in check. Teachers like this kid. Not that there’s anything wrong with this kid, but teachers project virtue on them sometimes just to shame kid B when kid B asks for consideration.
Kid B is who I assume many people here were and who I was. Kid B struggled to get from start to finish of all of the assignments that kept popping up and per haps couldn’t do the same task for very long. Kid B, however, could get high grades on most tests. If Kid B asks for some consideration to pass the class as they’ve gotten the information but weren’t able to finish all of the assignments and are told no, because Kid A exists and “I can stand someone who struggles with the tests but does the work, but I’ll never tolerate someone who is lazy”.
I have cptsd from years spent as kid B, but I’m pretty sure that’s a generic thing that happened to others as well. I had that quote shoved down my throat by a double digit number of adults. And the too-radical thought is this: I believe the teaching approach that holds kid A as a paragon of virtue and kid B as a lazy snot is quite discriminatory and maybe those are just two differently struggling kids. And maybe some consideration should be given to both. And maybe PTSD causing trauma should be withheld from both groups
Many teachers liked me, but they definitely were frustrated because they thought I was relying on my good tests only, as if I thought that being smart was enough in life. They warned me that hard work was also necessary.
I don’t blame them, and it is kind that they were worried about it, but it was not an attitude or belief, it was ADHD! A teacher even detected my memory problems and suggested a to-do list, but she didn’t know that even acquiring those habits is hard for us.
I wish my teachers knew more about ADHD as all the clues were there. An early diagnosis would have helped me a lot.
Nah. We had kid A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z, each struggling in our own way. But individual tutoring is impossible so what was applied instead is the “good enough”.
The problem with bulk education is that it accepts a bare minimum and arbitrarily decides everything else are defect products. Yet those ‘defect products’ that manage to etch out a way forward on their own often end up much better than the bulk carelessly tossed on the production line.
Proper education is a conundrum. But any educator worth their salt will agree on one thing: If a student can’t learn, it’s the teacher that’s failing to teach.
Am I the only one who was never told off as lazy by my teachers? Even if I neglected to turn in homework regularly, I worked hard on projects and participated in class. I don’t think I’ve ever asked a teacher to just let me pass if I didn’t make the grade. I usually calculated out what my grade would be if I missed a certain number of assignments, and figured out what test scores I needed. When I didn’t pass, maybe I lacked the gall or the privilege but it has never occured to me to ask a teacher to change something where the criteria was clearly spelled out from the start.
Those little classroom assignments were definitely not all spelled out from the start and that’s what I didn’t have the capacity to participate in all the time. But say I started off at like 70% capacity. Getting hounded and called lazy and sometimes actually punished during that extra 30% causes my capacity to go down to say 60%. Then I’m being hounded and punished 40% of the time which has an even bigger effect and basically keeps my burnout at 100% and my ability to participate suppressed to 0. The lower my total capacity for participation is the more severe consequences start to be too. Punishments become more likely for sure. This starts to turn into a really wide scope of trauma.
I was kid A. Of course, I didn’t turn in EVERY assignment but I burned myself out from an early age just to get by. I met my husband in college who kid B, and was always so jealous of his ability to do everything last minute, never study, and get higher grades than me. For reference, I’m a woman and I believe adhd looks a bit different for most of us than it does for men. Being kid A means I was diagnoses but never treated because I was “doing fine”. I struggled so much with depression and anxiety in my teens and 20s though.
LAUSD in the late nineties man. Fucking garbage.
