Let’s stop saying, “my low kids,” or “my low readers,” or “my low math kids,” or whatever other ways we homogenize and dehumanize students.
When I was teaching kids writing, my classroom had a dead word wall. It was a lasting tribute to our lexicographical kills throughout the year – the words we determined as overused or ineffective in communicating our ideas. They added imprecision and subtracted meaning.
“Low” is the first word on the dead word wall of teachers. It acts as a pseudo-insulting stand in for the words we can’t say. It’s a kinder, coded version of slow, stupid, and dumb and also has some sort of qualified protection. When we say low, we are abbreviating “low scoring” (often in reference to standardized assessment). Looking more closely, low and low scoring are abbreviating our students.
In a recent conversation with a principal, she said to me, “Our data…” At the finish of her sentence, I asked, “When you say our data, what are you referring to?” Unless we are examining a robust body of evidence chronicling not only a student’s learning trajectory, but also their multiple opportunities to show their learning, I’m not inclined to sit at a table and pretend we are developing a useful understanding of that child.
Low not only abbreviates our students’ performance on assessments, it abbreviates the extent to which we see them, it closes the aperture of our understanding of the full sets of knowledge and ability they bring to learning as well as to the tasks we assess. When I hear teachers talk about students who surprise them on assessment scores, the sentence is something along the lines of, “Even my low students did well.”
I’m tempted each time to ask how many times these low students will have to score high before they earn enough of our esteem to become our middle or our high students.
I suppose, then, we run the risk of everyone being thought of as capable and diminish the value of framing education as a competition. Wouldn’t that be a beautiful day.
Doubleplusgood post! I like the idea of a dead word wall.
What’s interesting to me is in the different ways public versus private schools talk about students. The discourse in public schools seems quick to classify students (low, middle, high), while private schools use a more holistic approach when discussing individual or groups of students. Private schools may place less emphasis on “our data” and consider more factors in student performance.
It’s where thinking of them as “independent schools” really makes sense to me. With access to private schools, students and families also unencumber themselves from perversely incentivized feedback cycles and focuses on the cheapest forms metrics of learning money can buy.