Tuesday, May 1, 2012

Amazing Potential behind pretending faces in high school

You cannot know what is behind the person that you see. You see their body and their attitude and their public face, but you cannot know what is inside unless you listen and ask the right questions. I am a teacher in a private high school and today I found out something amazing about a student's capabilities that I had no idea was there. This student is a girl that is overweight, always runs late to my class, usually has a poor attitude and acts likes she is unable to understand or complete the Spanish class assignments I give to her. Her outward person has said the same thing to me all year, "this is too hard for me-I can't do this work. Guess what I found out today? She has her PLAN test out looking at it and I asked if I could see her test results. She said, "sure." Wow! She scored in the 80th and 90th percentile in English and other skills. She scored in the 97th percentile in reading! All this time she was acting not so smart and she is one of the smartest people in America when it comes to reading and comprehension! That was an eye-opener for me. As teachers sometimes we feel compassion and even sorry for students who struggle but at the same time many, many students lie to us with their facial expressions and actions and try to get us to believe that they are incapable of doing the "impossible" tasks we are asking them to do. I am not saying that there are not those that genuinely do struggle, because there are those for sure. I am saying that every student who puts on a show of struggling and barely making it is not always telling the truth. They are communicating to the teacher their laziness more than their capability. Even the student's skills I discovered today, that student told me, point-blank that they are lazy. The lesson I learned is don't always believe peoples actions, attitudes and faces. There is amazing potential and capabilities under most of those acts!

Unbelievable Internet Resources HERE 

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