My Personal Thoughts

This year at work, we decided that our theme would be "Accountability". I work with teenagers and a sense accountability these days with teens these days is negligible at best. During pre-school-year meetings we discussed accountability, how to emphasize it throughout the year with the kids. A major component of accountability is consequences, negative, positive or otherwise. So we had several in depth discussions about consequences as well. I noticed something interesting about our conversations regarding accountability and consequences. They were always student-centered. Such is the nature of our business, so it's not a major surprise. Also, teenagers, in general, tend to be less responsible. They neglect their responsibilities and often don't own the consequences which is what lead to these discussions in the first place. However, I tried to have us all keep in mind that adults need to be and work on being accountable as well. This goes for all adults, not just those working with children.

To get to the point, I started to consider the direct consequences of teacher interactions with students. A bad math teacher can cause a student to hate math for the rest of their lives and assume that they are not and never will be any good at it. The ways in which a teacher deals with an at-risk student could tip the scales in favor of destructive or inspirational behavior. I have seen this, first hand, work both ways. But people are often blind of the affects of even the smallest actions and the potential magnitude of their affects.

A precocious teen was working on an assignment where she was required to write about her feelings toward and an experience with mathematics. She recounted that when she was in second grade she was sat in a position where she could not see the white board. Because of this, she never learned the new material as it was presented and thought that everyone else knew it. This killed her self-esteem with regards to the subject. She thought that everyone else was smarter than her and that she was the only one that didn't get it, so she must have been unintelligent. She flat out assumed that she was not capable of learning math. This was a simple (and oft-made) oversight by her teacher and lead to 8 years of belief that she is incapable of learning. And as simple of a mistake as it may seem, the impact was so profound that this tenth grader still recounts it immediately as the most significant experience in her mathematics education.