A few years ago I had a student take the advanced chemistry class I was teaching. They did not do well on the first few exams we took and eventually I checked over how they had done in chemistry. Lo and behold their grade was quite low. Now when I recruit for IB chemistry or AP chemistry I make it a point to tell the students first that if they did not do well in chemistry that they should take AP chemistry or IB chemistry. Why go to college and struggle through the material alone when you can work through it with a high school teacher that is likely to be far superior at teaching and where you will move much slower through the material with a lot more assistance? When I lead with this I often hear a few students laugh as I start the comment before quickly realizing the validity of my perspective.
So you would think that the first thing that I would have done would have been to talk to the student about their struggles and their ambitions and goals of taking the class. But this year I had an overwhelming amount of struggle going on from my students and myself teaching new classes. So instead I deflected and would just get frustrated every time I had to grade another round of tests that had a demoralizing amount of wrong answers. Then at the end of the year I was talking to the student about college plans.
Me “What are you doing next year for school?”
Students “I’m not sure”
Me “Do you want some advice”
Student “Yeah, well the thing is, I just really love chemistry so much. It’s my favorite subject, but I’m so bad at it. I want to major in it, but I don’t know what to do.”
Had my frustrations with their lack of success influenced how I taught this student? If I had had a better perspective would that student not have those doubts? I could have taught them better than I did but now they got to carry all of the weight of my decisions. I was really disappointed in myself because even though I tell students that struggling students should take these classes I had never considered that a student could struggle and love the course. What had happened to my idealism? I love chemistry and I don’t love it because of how well I can do problems in it. I love taking the best results and conclusions from the smartest people throughout history. I love connecting the macroscopic level with models in the microscopic level so that students can understand what is happening. Teaching and learning chemistry is my passion and I had missed a chance to share that with someone seeking just that.
Every year there will be a staff meeting for our department where we talk about scheduling. I dread this meeting. Teachers somehow are systemically driven to develop philosophies that only student X belongs in a class and students that do not accomplish Y prior to the class are failures unworthy of learning that content. There is an angry tone in this conversation and in my view it is because the conversation is unhealthy. This meeting makes me feel like I've been trapped in the Stanford Prison Experiment and am stuck being a guard. We go to great lengths to prevent students from taking a variety of classes from AP courses to honors courses to regular chemistry. I wish this were an isolated thing, but I am quite confident that it is systemic because I see it frequently on social media, at conferences and from many teachers beyond my own district. But I believe very strongly that this mentality of exclusion is damaging and worthy of resistance. Students in our district are exposed to it every time they sign up for classes starting in 6th grade. There is an unrelenting pressure put on them that they are not good enough to be where they are and the mental health toll is a disaster. Think of a student that has been told every year that if they are not at a level of success that they should not be learning about chemistry, or biology or trigonometry. Now envision what happens if that student struggles in a unit. Even if they had been successful in everything they had done to that point, any struggle signals to the student that they do not belong in that class. The conversations we have about course selection likely make children unhealthy in how they learn and I believe also promote segregation based on race and gender.
We need to stop leading students to evaluate what they should do based on their grades and external mechanisms. Many would argue that grades are essential to this discussion, but we are talking about 11 year olds. We are talking about 14 year olds. How a 14 year old does should have no bearing on whether they can learn chemistry as a 15 year old. And often the evaluations we do don’t even make sense. Math skills are not essential to high school chemistry. High school chemistry uses multiplication and adding. Students that struggle with manipulations in chemistry class struggle because they do not understand the chemistry involved in the manipulations. Biology success should have no bearing on how a student does in chemistry. There are millions of people that were more successful than I was in biology both in high school and in college but only a handful of times have I felt out of place in chemistry or physics. These perspectives are common and counter productive. Teachers of struggling students resort to them because of being overwhelmed by the difficulty of teaching. If a student is struggling with something we should be able to give them specific feedback, have the student improve and continue that cycle throughout the year. Instead we give students overly simplistic directives to avoid having the conversations we aren’t prepared for. Work harder, study more, read the text more, etc.
Students, teachers, parents, counselors and administrators all contribute to the reduction of course selection. And perhaps all of us suffer the consequences of this as well. Counselors and administration often use course selection as a means to avoid dealing with problems in classes. If a class is taught using extreme methods that are exclusive, we help that teacher exclude students rather than address the teaching methods. This can cause parents to seek exclusivity as a sign of elite status rather than focusing on student achievement. This can allow negative teacher perceptions to fester. So let’s break this habit. If you’re a student don’t allow yourself and your fellow students to be marginalized by course selection presentations. Ask your teachers thoughtful questions and seek out their passion. Do the same with counselors. We all love what we do and chose our profession out of passion. Help us find our spark again. Guide us into talking about the best parts of classes rather than the worst so you can walk into a class confident you will learn valuable things rather than being nervous about grading policies. At some point in your life, no one will care what grades you got at all. For many of us, that is when we are 17 years old. So let’s spend less effort maximizing our GPA for little to no benefit and more effort learning about the best accomplishments of humanity.
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