Is nothing mine?

As I witness the variety of assignments that the children have as JesusHigh, I am struck by how much collaboration is stressed. Of course, the world is becoming more and more collaborative and group-think-driven, but I am not sure that these groups are being handled well. For instance, the study hall kids were in here legitimately working on a group project. The standard complaints ensued: “They are not doing any work,” “I don’t understand the point of working in groups,” and “I wish I was doing this by myself so that I didn’t have to worry about other people’s work”. One of the girls astutely commented on how the groups were broken-up “Why is there a group of all boys? That is just stupid.” The boys in the group of all boys made the observation that “All the smart kids are divided into different groups, so we’re just carrying each of our individual groups. She should have put the smart people together so that we could actually learn from each other”. Interesting concept. I can see the teacher’s attempt at making the groups “even”, but as a smart kid, I can definitely appreciate the pressure of performing work for not only the self, but two or three others in order to make the grade. At this point, one of the girls (they were sophomores) asked “Does this ever get better?” No. Short answer is no. Your only chance is in Honors courses and even then a divide between smart and super smart is still present. Jillian Russo, anyone?



Is nothing independent? I know that we want these kids to share and be open to others’ ideas and needs and other stuff, but why must it always be at the expense of the learning of the outliers, both top and bottom?



As a bonus fact, I was chatting with a child development specialist at a birthday party a week or so ago. She and I—we had never met before—were really hitting it off because we quickly recognized that we were leaps and bounds more intelligent than everyone else at the soiree. I usually do not jump to this conclusion. It was simply a self-evident fact of the evening. Anyway—bonus fact! She was talking about how annoyed she becomes when people use a turn of phrase amounting to “we learned how to share in kindergarten”. Why is this annoying? Children are not developmentally capable of sharing until such an age when they are capable of empathy. Children in kindergarten who share merely doing as they are told; it is a trained response of which they are reminded constantly. Left to their own devices, they would not voluntarily share without a reminder. True sharing—that is, voluntary sharing—is not seen until about age 7 or 8. While it is possible that your kindergarten teacher attempted to teach you to share, no student learns this behavior until first or second grade.



In the spirit of sharing, here is a fun graphic on the current break-down of social media use. I love this break-up of the distribution into a Media Food-Pyramid. Also, note that gaming, which includes Wii fit and is in any manifestation the most physically active portion of media consumption, is in the place of “Fats” on the traditional food pyramid.