Q1--Expectations

There is the story of the teacher who, struggling with a difficult class of disruptive children, checked their records and, to their astonishment, found they all had IQs of 120 and above. So they resolved to make their lessons more challenging, they were less tolerant of bad behaviour and they encouraged the pupils to believe they were capable of real achievement. The improvement in them was dramatic. It turned out the figures were their locker numbers! The story’s probably apocryphal but illustrates a universal truth. The challenging balance of setting the standard at the same time as exercising human forgiveness, almost without reservation, not least in the light of human frailty, in both the ‘offender’…and the judge. Dr. Carl Reinhardt’s response to the teacher who told him he had no faith in a particular child was unequivocal: “then you have no right to educate him”.