"Our idealization of a gifted person is someone so smart they don't have to try," says Sandra Graham of UCLA's Graduate School of Education (Seal, 1993, p31). We forget that genius is often 98 percent perspiration - and more damningly, we forget to remind our students of this fact.
In her captivating article The Trouble with Talent, Kathy Seal reiterates Jim Stigler and Harold W. Stevenson's assertion that our "fixation on innate ability causes us to waste the potential of many of our children. [Our] focus on natural talent is producing kids who give up easily and artful dodgers who would rather look smart than actually learn something (p30)." Stigler and Stevenson contrasted American students with Japanese students and found that "the Japanese kids assumed that if they kept working they'd eventually get it - [whilst the] Americans thought, either you get it or you don't (p30)." To push their point home they stated: "if you believe that achievement is mostly caused by ability, at some fundamental level you don't believe in education."
My name is Simon McDonald and I'm in my first year - my first semester, actually - of Macquarie University's Dip Ed program. Thus far I've experienced five days of practical experience - very little in the grand scheme of things - and I'm really only at the beginning of my journey towards becoming the best educator I can possibly be. This blog is serving as my submission for the EDUC107 assignment, Pedagogy and Development; but my hope is that, over time, I'll add to this blog and continue posting my thoughts on my various discoveries. Initially, however, this blog till take on a far more methodical tone - it's a major assignment, after all. Gradually I hope to make the content far more nonchalant in its approach - a far more personal experience, if you will. But during this initial stage I'll have to maintain a stringent aura of professionalism for the sake of my degree - I'm sure you understand, dear reader. The way I see it, this blog is an amalgamation of a resource package and researched miniature essays, all concocted in the format of a blog. I did not want to limit myself to merely a resource package - I wanted some room to elucidate on my findings - and hopefully the content suffices the requisites of the Pedagogy and Development assignment parameters. I've chosen a topic quite large in its scope; I don't pretend to have found literally every single piece of research on the topic - but I believe I've found some valid journals, articles, videos, and websites; altogether, enough content to present a valid opinion.
The inspiration for this blog was sparked when I read Kathy Seal's The Trouble with Talent article. I was forced to question my own pesonal beliefs on intelligence and how I classified the term; how I perceived gifted and talented. As I said in my second paragraph, I've only experienced five days of teaching in a classroom- but even then, I've found myself intrinsically identifying students and grouping them into categories: Gifted, Smart, Average, and Struggling. I didn't enter the classroom and purposefully do this; it just happened. And the more I dwell on it, the more my thought process annoys me; because now that I've categorized these children, regardless of how hard I try, I can't seem to re-classify them. My initial judgements have stuck - for better or worse - and there's no denying, I feel it's for the worst.
Seal's article ponders the issue of whether children are born smart or whether they get smart. I hate to admit it, but a part of me has always believed intelligence is inherited. That's a belief I developed during my own schooling, and half a decade later, it's impossibly to simply terminate this assertion. That's why I've based this blog on this topic - I don't want to be an educator who groups his children; I want to be an educator who convinces his students they can get smart. But to do that, I need to believe it myself; I need to understand the psychology of students and educators and why they feel this way.
My hope is that, come early June and this assignment has been handed in for assessment, my perspective will have changed; my eyes will have openned to the truth - that all children have the potential to be better learners; that educators must prove to children that they are capable of far greater things than they might believe.
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