Pigeonholing Children
From the desk of Carol…
I’m a reader all the time and a mathematician when necessitated. So it was clear to me when my great-niece, Madyson, reached the toddler stage she was going to be a reader. After all, she loved to look at and listen to books. She couldn’t seem to get enough of them. Her folks videotaped her “reading” and sent those videos to any friends and relatives who had the means to look at them.
A funny thing happened though. When my Madyson reached kindergarten her teacher talked about how well she seemed to understand numbers. Madyson talked about what she did in math that day at school. She asked for harder work. This interest came from out of the blue! Or did it?
Looking back I remember the videos of her sorting and counting the shoes dropped beside the side door entrance to the house. I hear her adding, “1 nugget and 1 nugget and 1 nugget is ‘free’ nuggets”. Why didn’t I see this interest? Was I distracted by the cute way she pronounced “three”? Did my own bias toward books cloud my view? I suspect this was the case.
“She’s our reader.” That’s how I saw her, and that’s fine but by pigeonholing her, what does that say to her about how she should see herself? By labeling any child as one thing only are we limiting their views of themselves?
I believe when we do not recognize all the many interests and abilities children have, we limit their chances of success. It’s not so much that we prevent them from learning. It’s that by pigeonholing them, we miss the opportunity to provide support for their further exploration of ideas, and when children don’t have this support it is more difficult for them to build self confidence.
When we honor the many gifts our children bring to the table, we give them a dose of confidence and a chance to pursue their interests. We help them become risk takers as learners and accept a defeat as a challenge to try again.
Madyson’s kindergarten teacher provided her with the tools she needed to see herself as I did not see her…a mathematician. Now as her “great”-aunt what did I do with this newfound knowledge? I bought for us to share together some fun books to combine her love of reading, math, and science. Just as importantly, I stopped classifying her as a reader, botanist, mathematician, or astronomer. I see her simply as a learner who is curious about the world around her.
And if I had any inclination to label her as a mathematician, Madyson destroyed it when she came home this year from her first day in first grade and announced she wanted to be a writer. Lucy Calkins here she comes via her path as a reader, botanist, mathematician, astronomer, or whatever paths she chooses!