Hidden Curriculum VIP - Audio - Effortless English

There are lots of reasons, but the point is in a typical class of children some will bephysically stronger and others won’t be. Just as some will already, even at kindergartenlevel, have a higher level of reading maybe because their parents taught them a lot ormaybe they just have a natural liking or love of that and others will have lower abilities.It doesn’t mean the lower ability students are stupid or there’s something wrong withthem. There’s nothing wrong with them. They can learn to read just as well as thestudents who begin at a higher level, absolutely. That’s been shown through research,Science, definitely.The problem, however, is that our school systems, from the very beginning, will labelthose children. Those children who start at a little bit lower level of reading automaticallyare labeled slow or low level and then this labeling affects them psychologically. Theystart to feel like there’s something wrong with them. They feel like they’re maybe a littlestupid or, you know, they can’t learn as fast as other kids.That belief will actually cause them to feel more stress and anxiety about learning, inthis case, this example, reading, which will actually cause them to learn much moreslowly and then over years, over several years, all the teachers keep labeling them. Oh,they’re slow. They’re not a good reader. They’re slow. They’re not a good reader. Andthen it comes true.They leave schools as adults and they feel like they’re a little bit stupid or something.I’m not very smart. It’s bullshit. It’s total bullshit. There’s nothing wrong with thosepeople. I could take them as adults, in fact, with English at least, I could teach them toread very, very, very well. No problem, absolutely.And, of course, you probably know of some psychological studies where they randomlytell teachers that certain students are very smart and other students are not, they’reslow, but it’s not true, right? It’s actually not true. It’s just random. It’s like they flip a coin,but here’s the thing. At the end of the year, the students that the teacher thought weresmarter, even if they weren’t, but the teacher thought they were, they actually learnmuch more and perform much better.By the end of the year, those students actually are getting much better results, readingbetter, everything better and the students that they tell the teacher are slow, theyperform less well. They learn more slowly during the year. It has nothing to do with theirintelligence. It’s the teacher’s attitude and belief that gets transferred to the students.It’s a very famous research study and you may know about it already. It’s not justchildren, its adults, it’s everybody that this happens with and it really upsets me as ateacher. It upsets me a lot. I hate to see it.www.EffortlessEnglishClub.com