Do We Need Labels?
I came early to my hatred of labels, and nothing in my years of teaching convinced me I was wrong to feel that way. Quite the oppostite, in fact.
One of the first experiences I had with the damage done by labelling was what it did to me. I was reading before I went to school and my voracious devouring of books quickly led to a vocabulary that was "gifted". The teachers all treated me as someone different than the other students, and that set me apart from them. It was a lonely place to be put into. It gave me the determination as a teacher to help out any child I found dumped in that same place.
Early in my career, I took the position of teaching the English class in an early French immersion school. I attended the late August meeting at which the previous teachers were expected to give an overview of personalities and abilities in the group of students going on to the next teacher. The grade two teacher told me that one girl in the group was "slow". I asked her to explain what she meant, so she told me that this girl couldn't keep up, couldn't do anything at grade level, but that if I just gave her some colouring to do and sat her in the corner, she would be no trouble. I couldn't quite believe my ears - give her colouring? What a way to dismiss an entire year of that child's life; but I wasn't there to educate the teachers, so I said nothing further to her.
When the kids arrived on the first day of school, I immediately set out to get to know the little one, asap. She was reading more than a year behind the grade level. Her spelling in English was still very much at the creative stage, and you could see that she already expected the colouring in the corner to be her lot. I decided right then that she and I together were gong to beat the label that had been slapped on her.
I started with a reworking of the spelling program. Words that you are interested in are words that you can spell, and so they become words that you can read. That was the basis on which I set out to explode their vocabularies. The students were paired off to work together on lists designed ech week by the two of them, with some input from me. They would pick a topic that interested them both and then tell me words relating to that topic, and I would write their list for them to study. They would use those words to tell the rest of us all about their topic after a couple of days of research. When dictation day came, they would give each other the words to spell and then I would mark them. Any mistakes were correctable, orally, if the student still wanted to try for a sticker. Most of them did.
"Perfect" was not the only sticker standard. "Improved" was the other one. Anyone who made mistakes could practise with me at recess and then retry their test. If they got even one previously incorrectly spelled word right the second time around, that was cause for celebration. The announcement was made to the whole class and the whole class would applaud the achievement. In no time the class became one big support group and they began to take their lists outside to the playground to help each other practice the words during more than one recess, much to the amazement of other teachers on staff seeing this happening.
I put up a large square of art paper on which I had drawn the "Spelling Monsters", perfectly horrible creatures that we needed to wipe out. There were no names in a list so there was no way to count a number of stickers beside a student's name. Anyone earning a sticker could put it anywhere on the monsters they chose. I put a weapon in the hands of the children with which to fight the monsters - quite literally - because I taught them the American Sign Language alphabet and we used that as one way to practice our words every week. The kids had the words in their hands and they quite enjoyed teaching the principal different words when we invited her to visit our busy room.
That class was one of the most involved I have ever had and they all benefitted from the approach I had taken to get rid of that label stuck on the one child. We had the monsters covered up a couple of months before the end of the year and we celebrated by having a special class breakfast to which each child could invite a guest. The star of that celebration was the "slow" one, although she never knew it. When we had finished our year together, she had gained more than two whole grade levels, so she wasn't just reading at level; she was actually a little ahead of it.
Years later, I ran into a young lady who recognized me and called out to me. I had to ask her name, because she was no longer a young schoolchild. When she said her first name, I knew her right away. When she left my classroom years earlier, she had an air of self-confidence about her that had been sadly lacking at the beginning of the year. She still had that air now, an aura that positively sparkled about her. She told me of her studies at the University and said that she still remembered the Spelling Monsters. She thanked me for caring, and I thanked her for the pleasure of having had her as a student. She gave me an opportunity she never knew about; an opportunity to toss a label on the garbage heap.
I know the rationale for educational labeling. It is deemed necessary to designate students as slow or gifted, so the argument goes, in order to access the funding that would not be available otherwise. I just don't think it's a system that works as well as the students to whom the labels are affixed need it to. Once a label has been slapped on, it rarely comes off. It is guarenteed to steal years of potential from a child if it is incorrectly applied. Even if it is correct, it can still backfire on them. I've seen too many "special ed" teachers that take their charges nowhere because they're unmotivated and it's just too easy to give the students some colouring and stick them in the corner. The only problem is that a child thus labeled and dismissed rarely makes it to university. Too often they don't even make it to high school graduation.
I hate labels. They can derail a whole life. Why can't the education system simply "label" each child with their own name and take it from there?
One of the first experiences I had with the damage done by labelling was what it did to me. I was reading before I went to school and my voracious devouring of books quickly led to a vocabulary that was "gifted". The teachers all treated me as someone different than the other students, and that set me apart from them. It was a lonely place to be put into. It gave me the determination as a teacher to help out any child I found dumped in that same place.
Early in my career, I took the position of teaching the English class in an early French immersion school. I attended the late August meeting at which the previous teachers were expected to give an overview of personalities and abilities in the group of students going on to the next teacher. The grade two teacher told me that one girl in the group was "slow". I asked her to explain what she meant, so she told me that this girl couldn't keep up, couldn't do anything at grade level, but that if I just gave her some colouring to do and sat her in the corner, she would be no trouble. I couldn't quite believe my ears - give her colouring? What a way to dismiss an entire year of that child's life; but I wasn't there to educate the teachers, so I said nothing further to her.
When the kids arrived on the first day of school, I immediately set out to get to know the little one, asap. She was reading more than a year behind the grade level. Her spelling in English was still very much at the creative stage, and you could see that she already expected the colouring in the corner to be her lot. I decided right then that she and I together were gong to beat the label that had been slapped on her.
I started with a reworking of the spelling program. Words that you are interested in are words that you can spell, and so they become words that you can read. That was the basis on which I set out to explode their vocabularies. The students were paired off to work together on lists designed ech week by the two of them, with some input from me. They would pick a topic that interested them both and then tell me words relating to that topic, and I would write their list for them to study. They would use those words to tell the rest of us all about their topic after a couple of days of research. When dictation day came, they would give each other the words to spell and then I would mark them. Any mistakes were correctable, orally, if the student still wanted to try for a sticker. Most of them did.
"Perfect" was not the only sticker standard. "Improved" was the other one. Anyone who made mistakes could practise with me at recess and then retry their test. If they got even one previously incorrectly spelled word right the second time around, that was cause for celebration. The announcement was made to the whole class and the whole class would applaud the achievement. In no time the class became one big support group and they began to take their lists outside to the playground to help each other practice the words during more than one recess, much to the amazement of other teachers on staff seeing this happening.
I put up a large square of art paper on which I had drawn the "Spelling Monsters", perfectly horrible creatures that we needed to wipe out. There were no names in a list so there was no way to count a number of stickers beside a student's name. Anyone earning a sticker could put it anywhere on the monsters they chose. I put a weapon in the hands of the children with which to fight the monsters - quite literally - because I taught them the American Sign Language alphabet and we used that as one way to practice our words every week. The kids had the words in their hands and they quite enjoyed teaching the principal different words when we invited her to visit our busy room.
That class was one of the most involved I have ever had and they all benefitted from the approach I had taken to get rid of that label stuck on the one child. We had the monsters covered up a couple of months before the end of the year and we celebrated by having a special class breakfast to which each child could invite a guest. The star of that celebration was the "slow" one, although she never knew it. When we had finished our year together, she had gained more than two whole grade levels, so she wasn't just reading at level; she was actually a little ahead of it.
Years later, I ran into a young lady who recognized me and called out to me. I had to ask her name, because she was no longer a young schoolchild. When she said her first name, I knew her right away. When she left my classroom years earlier, she had an air of self-confidence about her that had been sadly lacking at the beginning of the year. She still had that air now, an aura that positively sparkled about her. She told me of her studies at the University and said that she still remembered the Spelling Monsters. She thanked me for caring, and I thanked her for the pleasure of having had her as a student. She gave me an opportunity she never knew about; an opportunity to toss a label on the garbage heap.
I know the rationale for educational labeling. It is deemed necessary to designate students as slow or gifted, so the argument goes, in order to access the funding that would not be available otherwise. I just don't think it's a system that works as well as the students to whom the labels are affixed need it to. Once a label has been slapped on, it rarely comes off. It is guarenteed to steal years of potential from a child if it is incorrectly applied. Even if it is correct, it can still backfire on them. I've seen too many "special ed" teachers that take their charges nowhere because they're unmotivated and it's just too easy to give the students some colouring and stick them in the corner. The only problem is that a child thus labeled and dismissed rarely makes it to university. Too often they don't even make it to high school graduation.
I hate labels. They can derail a whole life. Why can't the education system simply "label" each child with their own name and take it from there?
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