Believe in Your Child

By Rabbi Y.Y. Rubinstein

When I started my teaching career in my first school, I was filled to the brim with principles and ideas which I was convinced would enable me to become the teaching success of the century. Training college had taught me all the modern techniques: Psychology, Sociology and all the rest. In particular, I was convinced of the value of honesty and truth in education. There was simply no point in beating around the bush -- the children would have to be honest with me, and I would be the same with them.

And so when it came to the annual report cards, I took it for granted that every parent would value my refreshingly frank comments. If a child had been disruptive and had wasted her time I said so, bullies were exposed, cheaters revealed and the angelic elite duly praised. Then two weeks later came the follow up... parents evening. This was the chance to explain my Report Card comments in full, and, no doubt, enjoy the deep gratitude which would be bestowed upon me by satisfied parents.

Now that I have school children of my own, I look back on the boyish and confident grin with which I greeted Mr and Mrs Proctor with disbelief and amazement. I now know that if any teacher dares to criticise any of my almost totally perfect offspring, it is only because they are mentally defective sadists, Anti-Semitic, or Anti-Semitic mentally defective sadists. Mr and Mrs Proctor seemed to have a similar view of me that night. Most of the parents did.

But there was something I learned at training college that never let me down. We were told of a primary school which had been contacted by their local University. The University explained that they had developed a new test which was able to detect children who were "Late Developers." No matter what the academic record of the children had been till now, this test would show which children were about to come to life and start doing really well.

The University people turned up and proceeded to test all the school's children. Teacher after teacher was amazed to discover that the pupils they had written off as being hopeless would within the next sixth months blossom and start doing well.

The University neglected to tell the school that they were making the whole thing up, and had given the children a normal I.Q. test. They simply selected the names of the lowest scoring children, and told their teachers that they were about to do well.

The amazing thing was that every one of the children did start doing well. Because the teachers started to "believe" in them and put in more effort with them, they actually became late developers.

Very often, people and particularly children don't live up to our expectations. When we change our attitude towards them we often learn that they didn't let us down... we let them down.

copyright Rabbi Y.Y. Rubinstein

Comments

Comments It makes sense. Faith is a gift; we come to it by believing first....not through thinking, but through the heart. We all respond to love. - C. K.  01/11/2002

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Beautiful. If we could only use this technique on ourselves! It is so much easier to believe someone else's suggestions than our own. Was it Solomon or one of his scribes that wrote "as a man thinks, so he is". The implication was that the thinking was mallable in ourselves as well as in the most receptive people, children. Maybe we ought to think of the little ones as Michaelangelo did his sculptures. He perceived that he slowly "released" them from the stone. Teachers, and teachers, likewise, can "release" the child from the prison of ignorance, by bypassing the present state of the child and reaching for.   01/09/2002

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I heard a very similar story when I was earning my MA in Education. A teacher received, at the beginning of the year, a list of all her students and their IQ levels. She realized that they were the advanced class from this alone -- all of them had above-average intelligence and were bound to succeed. She had an amazing time with the class. They grew, they flourished, they succeeded. Several months into the year, she discovered that she'd misunderstood the children's locker numbers. - T. M.  01/08/2002

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