Teachers Expectations

The challenges presented by today's inclusive classrooms often lead teachers to teach "to the middle." How might this harm students?

Teaching to the middle is common when a teacher has 100+ students; in fact, such an approach is likely the rule these days instead of the exception. But I have seen the detrimental effects of such a practice.

My nephew, who is in his first year of college, is quite intelligent. He scored well enough on his SATs to receive scholarship offers from several local colleges. But he was a C student. Whenever his mother would admonish him for not doing better, he'd complain that he was bored or that the teacher thought "everyone in the class was stupid." He began to resent his teachers for not believing he (and everyone else in the class) could do better. But Paul was lucky. He had the support and resources at home to be successful. What about those students in the class who didn't have books at home? Or those who struggled to meet the demands of a curriculum that was not tailored to their needs?

I've also experienced first hand in my own class room the results of what I call the "feel good" curriculum of the late 1980s and 1990s (what Williams refers to as the "self esteem movement"). During my second year of teaching, I gave my AP English students a poem by Nikki Giovanni called "Ego Tripping (There may be a reason why)." The poem narrates several great moments in the rise of Western Civilization and attributes such progress to the presence of women. But during the class discussion of the poem, one of my students said it was about the fickle nature of women. I responded that the student was misreading and asked him if he had read the author biography that introduced the poem. He, of course, had not. This was a smart, confident student. I was not surprised that he stayed after class to talk to me about the poem. But I was shocked by his perspective of the situation. He said to me, "How can I be wrong? It's literature. I'm allowed to interpret it any way I want." I didn't know how to respond. Surely there are wrong interpretations of litature--those that can't possibly be supported by textual evidence and those that run counter to everything we know about an author and his/her oeuvre. But somehow, this student had been led to believe that anything goes in literary analysis. His teachers' refusals to tell him "no, not exactly" cheated him and prevented him from developing a fairly essential life skill--critical thinking!