The person who captured my attention while reading Another Planet was Katie Hallberg. She is the director of the school’s talented and gifted program and also a math teacher. Her accomplishments include launching the “Synergy” program: a special program for the talented and gifted students of the school to gather together and push themselves beyond the normal high school curriculum. She also built the Calc Corner. The Calc Corner is:
A place set aside for the study hall her Advanced Placement Calculus were required to take so they could keep up with the work she heaped on them daily. But as much as a place that her Math students could struggle together through the volumes of solids of revolution, Calc Corner was a safe space for the school’s brains, a tiny piece of turf where they could cluster together over lunch, make popcorn in the microwave over and debate religion over politics without feeling abnormal.
I chose Hallberg mostly because I wish I had had a teacher like this in high school. I graduated valedictorian of my small school with a 4.0 GPA. That looks great on paper, but it doesn’t show my high school experience. My high school did not offer AP courses. I was so bored with class that I fell asleep in school at least twice a day. When teachers graded “on the curve,” my classmates would moan and complain when I got a high score. It didn’t matter to them that the reason I had gotten a good score was that I took the half hour at home to read the chapter unlike them. Their complaints started to slowly wear me down. I stopped trying my best.
When I went to take my ACTs, I had not done any preparing. I scored a 29, which was good enough to get into the school I wanted to with a good scholarship. Still, I wonder if I had a teacher like Hallberg to push me to my academic limits, if I could have done better. Just being exposed to some more difficult concepts is all it would have taken me to understand many of the questions on the test. Just a couple points on the ACT could make the difference between a good scholarship and a full ride.
Katie breaks the rules of the game by asking for more of her students. In Prior Lake, the rule is to nurture students; pushing them beyond their abilities is cruel. The argument Katie throws out is that students will never truly know their limits until the teachers push them to and past them. Clearly her philosophy is not shared by the other teachers. The teachers of Prior Lake deem her a snob for her actions. They don’t like how she would rather spend time with her students than gossiping in the teacher’s lounge.
The social theory of Privilege and Penalty is illustrated by Hallberg’s struggle. Students with higher intellect are labeled “outcasts” by their peers. The students push the smart students to the bottom of the hierarchy where their needs are forgotten. Teachers are even guiltier of this than children. They structure their curriculum around the needs of the average students: totally ignoring the needs of the talented. They then dole out punishment when the talented act out because of boredom. Katie Hallberg would instead nurture the gifts that push these students to the bottom. We need more teachers like her in our schools today.
Nice job, Steph. You were the first one to note the privilege and penalty theory. If you continue in education, you WILL be the teacher you didn't have. I heard one of the founders of one of the charter schools in Chicago speaking a couple of years ago. He said that he thinks teachers all teach from their "broken" place--the place where he or she was let down as a child. Your broken place may push you to push your students in a way you weren't.
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