Embracing the Misfits: Practical Applications

Every once in a while in a person's lifetime, there are those moments when something shifts and everything comes clear. I've been lucky enough to have a few of those moments. Sometimes it will be something I read or something someone says. It's happened when I've been sitting at a table playing with children or in the middle of writing a song. Now I won't claim that things stay clear...but I know they matter because I remember them, even when life goes on and I forget to do them, the memory is still there, ready to knock me between the eyes...again.

I'm pretty sure that it was David Jardine at the University of Calgary who said, "What if the problem kid isn't the problem, but your classroom that's creating a problem kid?" Suddenly there were a dozen kids flashing through my mind and I knew the truth of the statement. We spend so much time in the education system pathologizing and labeling "problem" kids. New labels are emerging every single year. I firmly believe that it is the limitations of the system (and often the classroom) that create so many misfits. The only problem is, instead of seeing them as creative emergent possibilities and re-examine what we are doing, we pathologize them until they leave the system: psychologically, socially, academically and finally physically. And everyone suffers for it.

In the past years we have discovered much information about brain development, how some learning can't take place until the brain reaches a certain threshold. We know that the clock in each student's body means that these changes don't take place on a specific timetable, yet our curriculum still works on a lock step system, governed by age and monitored by exams that have shackled our students and teachers to expectations that are often unrealistic. I know this because I have read the most recent School Progress Report published at my daughter's school. It reads somewhat like a quarterly report, 81% of students achieving at an acceptable level, the goal to improve on that number for next year. What will have to happen for the results to satisfy the accountants and share...I mean stakeholders? If we can achieve 81% certainly we can manage 82% or even 85%? A study in the Teacher Record Weekly last year concluded that the standardized tests used in the US for certain university programs have eliminated all the talent. What are we prepared to do to make our results look good?

I know that grouping our students by age is probably the most logical way to do it. It's probably the most likely way to get a good grouping of students at a similar stage of development. It's the most efficient way to organize our students to educate them. But what about the misfits? The ones who might not learn well in groups. The ones who might be auditory or kinesthetic learners instead of visual learners? The ones whose numeracy skills might be three levels ahead or behind their verbal skills? The ones who might have far too much happening at home to worry about what is happening at school? The next thing you know, you have a classroom of misfits. Maybe efficiency isn't the right approach. But then again who's to say that another approach, not dependent on numerical outcomes wouldn't be just as or more efficient? How do you teach a misfit let alone a classroom full of them?