I felt like this before. Shoot, I still feel like this at times in my role as a rotary teacher. See the grades, see the evened-out fluctuation of good and not-so-good ones, and consider my job done. But then I mark a set of math tests. Not just any ordinary set of tests. These tests were labored over by my own students. The kids in my homeroom. The students I see daily for at least half the school day. The students I know by first and last name, parent circumstance and all that other background info that goes into my assessment of them. And when I grade a class set of tests coming from my own students, I am sorry to say but I don’t get that “job well done, teacher” feeling. What I am suggesting is that when the class average is 70, I have failed.

I take a little bit more time when grading the work of students I have a strong connection with. I do look at the name of the student before I sit down and grade the test. I give half marks when I know the answer is wrong but I can see how the thinking was in the right place but led to a wrong final answer. When a student is bombing, I stop grading. I simply write at the top of the test, “Let’s work on this together tomorrow.” I am not okay with a student getting a 60 even though I know it will balance out my class average. In the most black and white class, math, my students get descriptive feedback. Not in the new-wave regimented sense of the term, but through the old-school, caring, “I’m grading this test now but these few words would be said  if I was sitting with you and grading this test right in front of you” way.

So, I wonder why we are looking for that curve when we say we want all our students to be successful? I do understand that 70 percent is, in fact, success to some of our students. But shoot, I only teach elementary school; I am in the game of instilling basic easy-peasy pudding type intellectual objectives. Multiplying, fractions, integers…that type of stuff. Nothing crazy conceptually. So as a teacher of younger students, I cannot be satisfied with a bell curve. Actually, I see no issues with all of my students getting 100 percent test after test.

I guess the question is how? How do I turn 25 out of 25 students into A plus masters of the discipline I teach. That answer would involve much more analysis that dives into the nature of schooling, test re-taking and lesson re-teaching, the acknowledgement of my mistakes as an educator (oh, don’t go there!) and many other things. The bottom line is this: the marginal class average is thought to be a sign of good teaching, but I would definitely second guess that whole idea. I mean, I second guess it every time I grade a class set of work and see that some students get it and others don’t. Perhaps the focus these days should shift from the student and his flaws to the teacher and all the flaws that we bring to the classroom, lesson in and lesson out.

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Let’s take (the majority of) the boys for starters. Most of them rushed through the gingerbread house making activity. They were not patient enough to set the walls in place. They used too much or too little icing on parts that were supposed to connect the house together. Some hastily unpacked their pieces which subsequently led to the gingerbread being already broken before they even started. A few made a diligent attempt to construct the house, but when a piece would eventually fall or slide out of place, instead of having the resilience to re-set the falling piece, they grew frustrated and impatient. End result: maybe two out of fourteen boys went home that day with an intact gingerbread house.

After observing and laughing with the boys for quite some time, I went over to see how the girls were doing. (For this activity, we organized the class by pushing the desks into two long groups and I let the students sit wherever they wanted; so naturally, all the boys went to one table and all the girls went to the other). On the contrary to where you think I was heading with this piece, I observed much of the same things that I saw over at the boys’ table. Some of the girls made elegant gingerbread houses equipped with amazingly designed and perfectly distributed icing. Some had so little patience that after fifteen minutes their gingerbread house was a pile of broken cookie pieces with icing layered all over it. A small group of girls, instead of making the actual house, sat and ate the icing and candy that came with it while chatting. Out of sixteen girls, maybe nine went home with a pristine house.

How does this story tie into themes of teaching and education? One activity, as fun and engaging as it might be, is never going to speak to the unique abilities and strengths of every student in the class. Most of the students didn’t mind going home with half crushed, falling apart gingerbread houses. But when we take the gingerbread houses and replace them with grades and tests, we can start to see the flaws in teaching to a one activity, one assessment approach. If building the gingerbread house was a test, eleven out of thirty would have passed. Now, some would have done better if they got to see someone else model how to make it. Others would have done better if they could work in a quiet environment. You get the basic point here: a cookie cutter, one box approach to teaching and learning is a faulty way of going about our job as a teacher. We’ve got to mix it up, add a little icing so to speak. Yeah…these were just some thoughts as I watched my students having fun on a cool winter day.

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What do you do when you teach a fifth grade class that consists of thirty students and amongst those thirty students, you have one who can pass an LSAT test and another who can’t count down from ten? Welcome to Mr. Morris’ 2015-16 classroom. Differentiated instruction? Pfff. I am talking about teaching extremes here.

Ever since I became a teacher, the biggest, baddest, most bold buzzword belonged to the trope of differentiated instruction. It was drilled into us in the teacher preparation program. Provide students with multiple means or methods to demonstrate their learning. Afford your children the opportunity to illustrate their skill through more than a pen and paper test. Students have multiple intelligences; some are kinesthetic learners, others are stronger in a heavily linguistic atmosphere and some excel visually or spatially. Teachers must cater to all types. This is the way we get the most out of each and every student. It all makes sense to me and in fact I have witnessed Gardner’s theory in play throughout the year in my classroom.

But I have never had to dole out differentiated instruction like I had to this year. Government and board-wide cutbacks to education extended their hand in recent years which means many specialized programs have folded for the sake of the all mighty dollar. So I am left in the classroom trying to provide one student with enough engaging just so I don’t stifle the potential of the next possible Steve Jobs while trying to teach the student, who happens to sit right beside him, how to count by two’s. Did I mention that I teach fifth grade?

Besides our taxes, how do cutbacks to education serve a purpose? I could aid both of these students to the best of their potential if there was an opportunity to work more closely with them on a continual basis. But besides them, I have 28 other students who need my guidance and attention. Even with the other 28, there is still a range within my class (much like every other class, everywhere) of students who are able and eager to analyze Of Mice and Men while others are still learning how to decode words. Shit! Being a teacher ain’t no joke.

To answer my own question, cutbacks only hurt these students. Differentiated instruction is valuable and essential to learning. It is helpful to both students and teachers. Teachers must provide students with opportunities to thrive in their own element or, at the least, multiple elements that allow us and them to understand that school, much like life, is about possessing varying personal flexibilities. But teaching to the extremes merely hurts every student in the room. When the learning dynamic is that diverse it does everyone a disservice.

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This conversation with my professor got me thinking about notions of “smartness”. And I must say, teaching in elementary school, where students are routinely asked to understand basic level mathematical concepts and compose rudimentary prose, one often has that fledgling feeling that some people are inherently more scholastically skilled than others. But scholastic skills do not equal intelligence.

Let’s think about a math class. Some students naturally pick up concepts, others struggle with concepts for a while until they gradually conceptualize understanding, and some seem to never be able to fully grasp an idea. So are those students’ who pick up the concept of long division the fastest “smarter” than the ones who don’t?

I asked this question in a casual conversation to some teachers one day in the staffroom. Their answers surprised me. The majority felt that some people are, in fact, born smarter than others. Some cited their own experience of growing up in a non-English speaking household but still having the diligence to “go to a bedroom, do homework, and try to get good grades despite any parent involvement.” I retorted with a simple question: Does the lack of linguistic parental support in terms of helping a child equal the familial provision that intrinsically espouses hard work? Is there not some type of intrinsic mental cognition that happens by seeing your parents work a good job and being able to come home at a regular time and then ask you (in whatever language they speak) if you did your homework, and not let you “slide” if you didn’t? Do these things not mean that your parents were feverishly involved in your education? Moreover, what about individual intrinsic motivations? If a student sees herself as a “good math student”, is that not enough to push that student to persevere through obstacles and continue to enrich her learning? The many teachers I talked with took up the counterintuitive stance (counterintuitive by virtue of their profession) that “smartness” is inherently a natural thing that has little to do with environment or the nurture side of human development.

This is a scary thought to come from teachers whose job is to uphold a mission statement somewhere detailing that all students have the ability to grow intellectually. If teachers come in with the mentality that each student has a “set limit” on what they can accomplish intellectually, where does that leave their classroom and the students they teach? How does their role as a teacher differentiate from a scantron card? And that is precisely my point. Teaching has more to do with the intrinsic qualities of nurturing minds. If you demonstrate belief in a student by instilling confidence, having patience and experimenting with different pedagogical methods, you will see that each student is just a capable as the next. The mind is a very adaptable thing. It is always growing, firing and closing down brain neurons simultaneously. So, that child who thinks they are “smart” at something will continue to grow at that thing. Conversely, that child who thinks they are weak at something will fade to the margins and lose that potential to grow in that area.

After my conversations with the adults in my school, I sat down with three 8^th grade girls and asked them, “Do you think that some people are born smarter than others”? After a few minutes of dialogue, their comments, or rather questions were more cerebral than many of the fixed-mentality teachers I spoke with. One girl asked, “How do you define smart…what does being smarter entail?” And I am sure that inside her 13-year-old brain she was trying to contextualize the notion of universal measurements of intelligence. It was a great question that made me smile. How do we define what “smartness” means? Because a child can grasp a math concept easier than another, does that mean said child is smarter? Is the unanimous measure of intelligence an I.Q. test? There are so many circumstantial, environmental, motivational, and perceptual complications that tie into one’s intelligence. It is too simplistic to simply argue that some people are born smarter than others. If you knew me at age 17, you would say that I was of “average intelligence;” a solid B student. But through my life, I like to think I’ve grown (perhaps to a B+ range now!). Through experience, reading, writing, learning, talking with others, through understanding importance and through understanding life I’ve grown intellectually. But was I born this way or did I get smarter?

This short venting session is riddled with questions. And it is riddled with questions on purpose. Partly because even though I have an opinion on the fundamental question posed here, I know  that I do not know the answer. I think Socrates said something to that tune. Hmmm…am I as smart as him?

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