Why Common Labels Teachers Use For Kids Aren’t The Whole Story: What I Learned In Schools
I started subbing at my son’s elementary school last fall to fill in the gaps in my work schedule, and on my first day, I found a crumpled post-it note stuck to a half-eaten honey oat granola bar on the teacher’s desk. It had three quick notes about kids I needed to watch for, and the first line read: “Milo – very distracted, can’t stay on task.”
Milo was the kid slouched in the back row by the window, and when I walked over halfway through independent reading to check on him, his notebook wasn’t open to the chapter we were working on. It was full of drawings of sparrows, with little scribbled numbers next to each one: 4 males, 2 females, nest has 5 eggs. He’d been watching the oak tree outside the window for a week, tracking when the adult birds came and went. I asked him how long he’d been counting, and he talked for three straight minutes about how the mother sparrow only left for five minutes at a time to get food, and he was waiting for the eggs to hatch. He wasn’t distracted. He was just intensely focused on something that wasn’t on the lesson plan.
That wasn’t the first or last quick statement I’d hear about kids in school that day. After class, I was cleaning up the lunch room when I heard another teacher walking by, nodding at a 4th grader sitting alone on the end of a bench. “She’s just quiet,” she said. “That’s Lila, she doesn’t like to join in with the other kids.” Fifteen minutes later, I saw Lila get up when a crying kindergartener dropped her apple sauce all over her shoes. Lila pulled out her own pack of wet wipes, helped the little girl clean off her socks, and walked her back to her class before she came back to finish her own sandwich. She wasn’t antisocial or unengaged. She was just engaging in the stuff that doesn’t get counted on attendance or class participation sheets.
A month later, I sat in my own son’s parent-teacher conference and heard another one of these familiar statements. The teacher smiled and said, “Jake is such a model student. He always follows directions, never disrupts, and turns in all his work on time.” I left the conference feeling proud at first, but that night I asked Jake why he never mentioned he’d gotten a B on his last math quiz. He shrugged and said, “It wasn’t that bad, and I didn’t want to ask the teacher for help after class. Everyone else gets it, and I didn’t want to hold the class up.” The label of “model student” sounded like a compliment, but it hid that he was so focused on being good that he was hiding the parts where he struggled.
I’ve heard at least a dozen of these statements every week I’ve been in the building, and I get why we use them. Teachers are stretched thin, they have 25 kids to get through a lesson in 45 minutes, and they need quick shortcuts to explain a kid’s behavior to a substitute or a parent. The problem isn’t that the statements are always wrong – Milo does wander off if no one checks in, Lila does prefer sitting on her own to big group games, Jake does always follow directions. The problem is when we stop at the statement, and don’t look past it.
What I’ve started doing, both as a sub and a parent, is small concrete things that don’t add a lot of extra work. When I see a kid labeled distracted, I don’t just redirect them back to the worksheet immediately. I stop for 30 seconds to see what they’re looking at or drawing. Most of the time, I can work that interest into the day – with Milo, I asked him to give a 2 minute update to the class on the sparrows after morning announcements once a week, and I let him take a 2 minute break to check the nest between rotations. His “distractions” went down by more than half, because he didn’t have to sneak the time he needed for the thing he cared about.
When I hear a kid is just quiet, I don’t force them to raise their hand more or join the big group game at recess. I look for the small ways they already connect with other people, and give them a low-stakes role that fits that. With Lila, I asked her to help me check in new kids when they visited the classroom, because I saw how good she was at helping younger kids. She never became the loudest kid in the class, but she stopped looking like she was just waiting for the day to end.
When a teacher tells you your kid is a model student, don’t just thank them and leave. Ask one specific question: “Do they ever speak up when they don’t understand something?” After Jake’s conference, I talked to his teacher about calling on him even when he doesn’t raise his hand, and at home I changed our after-school check-in from “how was school” to “what’s one thing that felt confusing today”. It doesn’t get him to speak up every time, but it’s opened the door a little.
Last week, I subbed in 4th grade again, and Milo pulled me over to the window to show me three fuzzy baby sparrows poking out of the nest. He got permission from the principal to tape a hand-drawn sign to the fence by the tree asking kids to keep their distance. Lila was sitting on her usual end of the lunch bench, but this time she was with a new girl who joined the class two weeks before. Jake still doesn’t always tell me when he’s stuck, but last week he admitted he didn’t get long division, and we sat at the kitchen table for 15 minutes working through it together.
No one’s going to stop using quick statements to describe kids. We’re all busy, and we all need shortcuts. The work is just remembering that the shortcut isn’t the whole map. You don’t have to rewrite the whole school system to see the kid behind the label. Most of the time, all it takes is 30 extra seconds to look.
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