I was a good students according to commonsense. Excluding one schoolyard fight in which I “threw Alex into a tree” because we had just found out the Dumbledore was gay and they were making fun of my love for Harry Potter by assuming that I should be ashamed of this fact, I was never really in trouble. I sat quietly, did my work, turned in papers and tests that were mostly high 90s and were all on time. And that’s what commonsense says that being a good student and really, a good person is.
A good students is a student who causes no grief or issues. They listen to the teacher during lectures. Participate in class discussions with the correct answer and not some smart remark. Do not talk when the teacher is talking. Do their homework in a timely manner and to the best of their abilities. Basically, perfect little images of complacency and silence.
Generally, the students who are privileged by this definition of commonsense are the students who thrive in a quiet and structured work environment. Students who do not struggle with what is being taught and who don’t get frustrated when something is not clear to them. Students who are generally passive and do not challenge teachers on what is being taught.
Teachers who like students who are easy. And don’t get me wrong, having a student who does their work on time, who participates in class and who is generally easy going is like a dream to me as well. But I honestly enjoy myself and my teaching more when I have “troublemakers” in my class.
Due to the narrow margin of students who can fit into this commonsense definition of a good student, it becomes much harder for those who struggle to fit into the complacency that is demanded to gain respect from their teachers and they will be labelled as a problem.
Like in Kumashiro’s experience with M, a student who is treated like they have problems will begin to believe that it is an inherent failing of themselves. They will believe that they are bad students, and therefore, bad people, and not worth being taught.
Being labelled can cause many negative affects. It can make a student depressed or sad, accepting of their role as a failure. But they can also get angry, and then you not only have a student who is “disruptive” you have a student who is unapologetic and determined to be the worst they can possibly be because go big or go home, right?
This idea of commonsense shuts out the idea of equality in a classroom by stating that some students are simply better than others because they fit the criteria that makes them better and so they deserve special treatment. Which is sad, honestly, because some students don’t learn by sitting in a desk, they need to be hands on. There was a student in Grade Nine when I was in Grade Twelve that my math teacher spoke about once. She said that she was honestly sad that she couldn’t make the classroom work better for him because he needed to be out fixing a car or doing math with visuals instead of sitting in a classroom, but that’s just not how education works. And that upsets me, because it is hard when you have 20+ students in a room and 20% need hands on learning and 15% respond better to being asked questions and 50% don’t want to share in class and the other 15% doesn’t even want to be here because they need to get a job to support their family and I am off on a tangent and that is just upsetting and oh my goodness.
So yeah. The challenge is going to be how do we include all learners and all students in education when you are teaching one diverse group the same lesson. But a big step in making that inclusiveness easier is to not treat some students as devils and others as angels. Because students aren’t stupid – they see favoritism and they see when a teacher just doesn’t care about them anymore. And in some cases, that really is the most damming thing to their education. Because then they don’t try because you believe that they won’t try. And your lesson just got a whole lot more difficult to teach to everyone.
Sarah Kirschman's Education Discussions and Feelings 
“Being labelled can cause many negative effects.”
You hit the nail on the head here. I know of someone who almost never tries to figure things out by themselves anymore. They assume that they are too ‘dumb’ to figure anything out when they don’t get it right away, and don’t even put the effort in. How we destroy people’s ability to learn and grow when we make them believe they are too stupid, or that they are bad, or that they just do things wrong!
I really like what you talked about here. I am also a privileged student and thrived in a commonsense classroom setting. There’s so many reasons as to why students could be struggling to fit in and unfortunately its all out of our control. Of course there are some methods out there that can help teachers with a diverse classroom but unless we have a huge structure change in our schooling systems it will never be optimal for every student. It is kind of a depressing subject when you start to think about it, but as future teachers we can continue to work on the problems that we are faced with in the schooling system structure. All teachers should be working towards a few common goals, and this is one of them.
Sarah, you should never say you ramble too long because everything you’ve said is compelling and makes me think! I agree that at the end of the day it is difficult to teach an entire class when everyone is very diverse and include everyone in conversation. “Because students aren’t stupid” we need to remember that. Students are observant and you’re right, they notice when a teacher is playing favorites.
I agree, this is an incredibly prevalent problem within the school systems. I know that I, myself, often struggle with learning in a peace-and-quiet environment, and have been known to be disruptive to the class while still being able to learn. The question then is, how can this problem be fixed? Can schools be changed within the parameters that the education system has set, or does the whole system need to be deconstructed before the problem can be fixed?
Great article, I particularly enjoyed the detention slips.