Keeping the Teacher Happy

Extract

In his book How Children Fail, John Holt talks about the strategies children have for coping with school. The strategies of most children, says Holt,

have been consistently self-centred, protective and aimed above all else at avoiding trouble, embarrassment, punishment, disapproval or loss of status. This is particularly true of the ones who have had a tough time in school. When they get a problem, I can read the thoughts on their faces. I can almost hear them, ‘Am I going to get this right? Probably not. What’ll happen to me when I get it wrong? Will the teacher get mad? Will the other kids laugh at me?’

I didn’t really get to thinking much about children’s strategies until I had stopped teaching and gone into a few classes to observe as a fly on the wall. Most of what went on in the classroom went completely unnoticed by the teacher. And what the teacher did notice, she seemed often to misunderstand. The children had an amazing variety of strategies which really had the teacher fooled. Some of them had fooled me too, for the years I had been teaching. I thought that if I were to point out some of the strategies which I saw, teachers may begin to look more carefully at their own and their children’s behaviour.