Savita Malshe
T O P I C :
Not So Comfortable Anymore
Savita Poses the Question. . . .
October 21, 2007
In my seventh grade class, in the sixth period, I have a group of students and we had a chemistry and pace set for them for learning. They were really comfortable until a few days ago when we got a new student in the class who has been home schooled. On the very first day in the class he made a comment that he is smarter that everybody else in the class and whatever I was teaching was very easy for him. All the students got offended by that comment. He keeps on working on homework during instruction time in spite of me making him work on it twice. Please suggest how me and my mentor teacher can resolve this.
Ethan Reese-Whiting answers....
November 29, 2007
To Savita,
It sounds like you've come up against one of the classic challenges with home-schooled students. Parents home school for a variety of reasons, some valid and some... well... we all have our own opinions on what might be considered valid and what is not. Sometimes students are home schooled because of medical problems. I had one student in my last rotation who had been home schooled for three years because of a serious heart condition. And we've all heard of or encountered students home schooled for, ahem, religious reasons. For my response, I'm going to stay away from the potential ramifications of religious home schooling.
Naturally, a student's intellect is going to depend on how they were home schooled and what they were taught. We'll focus mainly on those situations where the schooling parent has done a solid job of teaching their child. Since home-schooled students get undivided attention and almost exclusive one-on-one attention, it's not surprising that they would be more capable of meeting the challenges set before them in a classroom environment. Where home-schooled students often fall short, however, is in social interaction skills. Since they haven't had a lot of opportunities to interact with different people on a daily basis in the same way as traditionally educated students, they haven't had a chance to develop those social skills we try to teach them in school.
With regards to his attitude, you may need to address this on two fronts. The first is obviously the student. You may have to talk with him and let him know that derogatory comments about other students' intellect and capabilities are not acceptable. It's not respectful and it's not polite. School is about more than intellectual ability. It's about growing as a human being, and a good human being is respectful of others. They respect that people are different and have different strengths and weaknesses. You may also need to talk with the parents. Sometimes the student's attitude is an extension of the parents' attitudes. Sometimes they have told the student that, because they were home schooled, they are clearly smarter than other kids. Even if that's true, a responsible parent doesn't teach a child to think they are better than everyone else. You might need to assess the parents' attitudes and see if they are a source of the child's egocentrism. Whether or not they are, it may help to talk with them about the student's attitudes and how they are affecting his ability to get along with other students. This is an issue that could create problems for him in the future if he cannot learn to be respectful of people's differences, even if he does feel he's smarter.
I have a favorite anecdote from personal experiences with this sort of respect issue. I worked at a small "mom and pop" environmental consulting firm in Missouri. For a while, the owner's son also worked at the company. We weren't large enough to have a large staff for different tasks, so we subcontracted out tasks like backhoe operations. The owner of the backhoe company was a very skilled backhoe operator. If you've ever wanted to see how a huge piece of construction equipment could move like poetry in motion, he was your man. The catch for many people, however, was that he never went to school beyond third grade. He was from a very rural area in the Missouri bootheel and basically worked on a farm most of his childhood.
The son of the firm's owners did not get along with this fellow. He was rather haughty about the backhoe owner's lack of education, despite the fact that this boy had dropped out of college for no real reason other than he's never found his focus in life. Despite this, the backhoe operators always referred to him as "college boy." Basically, they were implying that he thought he was so much smarter than these guys and made no bones about making that known. Conversely, I got along swimmingly with these fellows. They knew I had a master's degree in geology and typically relied on me to do the math for keeping track of how many trucks had come and gone, how many tons of soil had been removed from a polluted site, and so forth. They jokingly referred to me as "the calculator with legs." This term was an expression of fondness, not derision. The difference was that, even though I had a lot more education than these guys, I respected our differences and recognized that everyone has something they are better at than other people. I was better at the intellectual stuff, but I would be hard-pressed to work a backhoe or do repairs with any kind of success.
The point of this rambling stroll down memory lane is that being smart means nothing if you can't respect people and get along with them. This is something this student needs to learn. His schooling for a while may be more about helping him develop as a person than developing his intellect.
As for doing his homework during class time, you may need to explain to him that it is very disrespectful of your attempts to teach the class. Even if he thinks he already knows what you're teaching, you may have information he is not aware of. Again, this sounds like it's boiling down to an issue of respect and social skills rather than intellect. You might try engaging him to help contribute to the class. As long as he can do it in a respectful manner, maybe you can challenge him to think of things to add to the class that will help other students relate to things better. If you can get the respect issues under control, perhaps you can engage him by making him an ally in helping the others, rather than an adversary with the "I already know this" demeanor.
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