The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth - Alexandra Robbins [146]
Teachers blame their colleagues for wedging students so tightly into categories that they get stuck there. “Very often, a teacher will think that once a kid is a troublemaker, he is always the one on the wrong side of a problem. This keeps the kid from learning to make the right choices (what’s the use?) and to trust adults for advice,” said a Connecticut teacher. “Colleagues make a borderline-negative kid a confirmed troublemaker when they treat him with a lack of respect. Those kids will go out of their way to be ‘good’ for me because I tell them they have it in them. The best way to get a kid to be a leader is to give him something to lead.” Or at least to believe that he has potential. Studies have shown that teachers’ and coaches’ subjective views about a student can affect the way they grade him or her. Regardless of actual performance, some teachers give higher grades to students whom they expect will do well than to the students for whom they don’t have high expectations.
Teachers and students nationwide told me that educators give popular students preferential treatment, much like Whitney and her fellow preps experienced at Riverland. An Arkansas teacher has seen coworkers “let the in-crowd get away with more.” Her coworker, for example, has a reputation for “paying a lot of attention to the popular crowd,” she said. “It’s widely known that she writes these kids passes to skip their regular classes to come sit in her class. She has even texted a student while the student was in my class.” A teacher at a school for juvenile offenders told me about administrators and teachers favoring popular, typically wealthy kids, “not expecting them to follow the same rules as the general population and allowing them off-periods to socialize and schmooze with the adults.” A counselor in Tennessee said that some of her colleagues joke around more with the “cool kids.”
Some teachers apparently take the jokes too far. Pennsylvania high school junior Beth Anne observed, “I see teachers participate in this social conformity as heavily as students do. In class, teachers are as merciless towards the unpopular kids as their peers are. In elementary school, teachers offered protection. If someone hurt you, made fun of you, the teacher was there to protect you. Now I see them participate in the demeaning of self-esteem.”
On a broader level, school practices can exacerbate social issues among students. Many schools tend to give honors and awards to the same groups of students every year. An Oklahoma teacher said, “Administrators favor the families who are big-money donors or board members. Those are the students who win the year-end awards and are often warned of Facebook pictures or behavior that could hurt their chances at recognition. The outcasts are just suspended.” Students said that members of the in crowd are handed student government positions, leads in plays, team captainships, and other distinctions that are selected by teachers rather than students.
The ways in which schools attempt to address problems among cliques can end up bolstering the same stereotypes they are trying to eradicate. Several students pointed out that many of the programs that schools implement for this purpose limit the number of participants. “It disgusts me to think that the school has spent thousands of dollars so we can go through these school-bonding lectures and nothing comes out of it,” said the Massachusetts flirt. “[One] program is supposed to create a more welcoming school environment. To be in the program, students have to be recommended by their teachers and take a Friday off every other month to play bonding