Reading the article “I flunked out. I lost a year!” by Marco Michelini, I was reminded of a personal memory.
I was 11 years old, sixth grade. Very shy… Today I would have been diagnosed with “selective mutism.” I was studying, but in questions, even though I knew the answers, I couldn’t open my mouth. Flunked!
That was many years ago and in the school there was not even the idea of a listening desk nor even those PDPs (Differentiated Learning Programs) that now rage.
The following school year, obviously a repeater: 7 in conduct and excellent grades in all subjects. I never stopped “chatting” again!
How did I experience the rejection? Not a failure, not a giving up, but a fundamental push.
In today’s school there are listening desks, PDPs for more varied diagnoses, inclusion projects and more. All this, unfortunately, does not solve many difficult cases: at the listening desk the most problematic students do not go; PDPs are pieces of paper that communicate what the student cannot do, no indication for an overcoming of the problems; the various inclusion projects are often sporadic and not adherent to the real needs of the students.
Teachers can be roughly divided into two categories: the intransigent for whom, if a student does poorly in his or her subject, it is because he or she does not study and the final grade will be a more or less severe failing grade; then there are the “good” ones, those for whom a passing grade is not denied to anyone. The two seemingly opposite categories are equivalent in nullifying the human reality of the student: the former does not see that going poorly in school is the first symptom of something wrong; the latter “pretends” that everything is fine. School should be something else! A constant presence of the psychologist with activities in classrooms, to unearth problem situations and provide support to teachers who are not psychologists and, apart from a few cases of personal training as well as great humanity, often do not know how to deal with students with even very serious problems and, sometimes, do not see them at all. Indispensable training courses for teachers, given by specialized and truly trained personnel, that help teachers discover what is hidden behind the gaze of the adolescents they have in front of them every morning
In the absence of adequate tools, what avenues can teachers take when, at the end of the school year, they have to “grade” a student with many serious inadequacies?
The “good guys” propose to raise a few grades and have remedial tests after a couple of months, the “bad guys” the flunking. Having arrived at the end of the year, the games are played, no one wonders if he or she has really done everything possible to help the student in the many months before.
I must confess that, in some cases, I found myself voting to fail in the knowledge that that student would not be able to make up in two months the three-subject program that he or she failed to study in nine months. This was with the knowledge that the flunking would not be experienced as a failure, but as a pause for reflection to start again with an extra gear. Sometimes it may turn out that behind the lack of commitment to school lies a “growth” crisis phase; the boy or girl is trying to figure out what is really important to accomplish. Then a break can be helpful. That’s what I experienced when I was 11 years old!
To ensure that the eventual rejection is not experienced as a failure, there should again be support from a psychologist to help the student understand what problems led to that result and find the internal resources to react positively.
But the responsibility does not lie solely with the teachers. The school has been burdened for decades by scarce and sporadic resources and, above all, by the hypocrisy of laws and decrees that seem to take care of school problems, but in fact hide a total disregard for the education of children and young people. All this puts teachers in an uncomfortable position, to say the least, between the obligation to observe regulations dropped from above, with “political” intentions that ignore the reality of schools, and the endemic lack of resources, especially human as well as material. It all falls on the “good will” of those who are willing to spend hours, not considered as working time, to talk to students and especially to get them to talk; to meet with parents to understand what is hidden in family relationships; to find ways to create harmony with colleagues, a point of vital importance: there is nothing worse than a non-harmonious teaching team that sends “schizophrenic” messages and confuses especially the most fragile.
Flunking is the effect of a failure of the school as a whole, not of the student even if he or she then pays the consequences.
Mariant
Leave a Reply