I totally hear you on the whole "skill as a mark of character" front. I'd get frustrated to tears over math as a kid, and then had to deal with the "shame" of not just being The GT Kid Who Sucked At Math, but being The GT Kid Who Cried Over The Fact She Sucked At Math. I had folks rag on me years afterward
( ... )
Man, I don't think I ever had a teacher that traumatized me that badly. Then again, when I was in first grade, I broke my teacher's foot. So perhaps the trauma just flowed in the other direction.
:( Teachers... Things they say to kids carry so much weight, and as kids we're inclined to believe that anything they say is the Truth, because... well, they're teachers!
I stopped singing when I was 12 because my homeroom teacher told me to go over to the boy's side during music class to back them up. No explanation other than that we were running out of boys with stable and non-changing voices. ... It made me believe that my voice revealed my deep secret wish to have been born a boy instead of a girl to anyone who heard it. (In reality it was probably as simple as me being the only girl who wasn't a squeaky, air-leaking soprano.) It made me stop singing when anyone could hear me. 30 years later, I'm still too scared to sing around people, even though I am at this point in my life rather open about not being comfortable having a female body.
Authority figures like teachers and parents really shape us. Sometimes it's good, sometimes, not so much.
And yes, you are amazing. :) I always enjoy reading your posts.
At least where I go (Lesley University, which has elementary ed as one of its major focuses) they don't really do anything to weed out people who suck with kids, as far as I can tell. Like, you get to your student teaching, and get your first real serious every day classroom experience, but that's the last semester of senior year, so you're pretty much fucked if you want to change majors then.
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Please read this... http://www.huffingtonpost.com/heidi-grant-halvorson-phd/girls-confidence_b_828418.html
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I stopped singing when I was 12 because my homeroom teacher told me to go over to the boy's side during music class to back them up. No explanation other than that we were running out of boys with stable and non-changing voices. ... It made me believe that my voice revealed my deep secret wish to have been born a boy instead of a girl to anyone who heard it. (In reality it was probably as simple as me being the only girl who wasn't a squeaky, air-leaking soprano.) It made me stop singing when anyone could hear me. 30 years later, I'm still too scared to sing around people, even though I am at this point in my life rather open about not being comfortable having a female body.
Authority figures like teachers and parents really shape us. Sometimes it's good, sometimes, not so much.
And yes, you are amazing. :) I always enjoy reading your posts.
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Thank you for this. It's something for me to think about.
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~Sor
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