Educational Outliers

I'm reading through Slate's articles from the last week, something I thought not-so-long-ago (c. 90 minutes) would become a weekly thing where I would post here something like a "Top 5 Things I Think You Should Read This Week" post. Turns out I can't get through most of the articles, and I need to go back to reading Slate (and Salon) every day, as I do SI and CNN (multiple times a day for each).

But, that aside, I just came across this article on how parental expectation is bad for children, which made me think about, well, camp. (What doesn't, you are likely to be asking yourself if you know me well?)

The article suggest (quite properly, I imagine) that the reason parents' expectations are bad for their children is that, usually, those expectations are way too high and wholly unrealistic. It is important, of course, to note that we are speaking here about developmental expectations - toilet training; speaking; focusing for an hour on studying homework; et c. This makes sense to me.

But I am wondering how - or even if - it flies in the face of some of my most precious educational belief: that high expectations are inherently good for both classes (in school) and עדות (at camp) - though my dissertation will hopefully begin the work of breaking down the need to distinguish between the two quite similar settings (assuming similar goals by the teacher/counselor/ראש עדה, of course). On this front, I am quite arrogant and place a phenomenal amount of faith and responsibility in the hands of the educator who will lead this group, assuming that, with the right skills (and such skills might differ for different groups) anyone can do amazing things with the group, especially if s/he does a good job in both calibrating and expressing expectation beforehand.

Now, I long ago learned that it was foolish to use my own educational experiences to generalize for anyone else (let alone everyone else), though it is still quite tempting to do so at every turn. Am I making a similar mistake here? More importantly, might I be setting up certain groups for failure?

In short - and I will keep pondering this, likely interminably - I think not. Because my definition of "greatness" from the groups is so fluid and subject to individual assessment, and because the core aspirations for the group are likely quite low.

In other words - and I will end here - if parents would just hope that their children would do something amazing by age X, Y, or Z, then they would likely be much more satisfied with the multiple great things their children will do. The educational takeaway for this is that if you write the test before the students start learning, the test will fail if it expects too much. But if we expect a great result on an assessment from children (or, even better, a class - there are issues here of individual vs. group that I'll have to flesh out later, though they might be patently obvious) and then allow that assessment to speak to their strengths (while still maintaining content standards, of course) then they will be able to do it.

Someone remind me of this post when I become a parent.