I have pretty high expectations of the people around me–to a certain extent. I have, for example, amazingly high expectations of writers of fiction. I have equally high expectations of my children and what they do in their lives. I have middling to low expectations of english students, which is likely the result of many semesters of sub par work and not enough time and energy to make more of them outstanding. This brings me to my point: expectations are the result of the external influences in any given subject or situation.
Garbage in, Garbage out. I say it all the time on this blog. What I do not say is that this philosophy carries over into the daily grind beyond writing. If I get 300 bad students over the course of a year (25x8x2 with space for good ones) eventually I start to think that there are only bad ones and the goos ones are a rarity that I must enjoy. I start to lower expectations in order to remove that feeling of futility and learn to accept that maybe the 300 are not so bad. In developmental education we called it ‘meeting them where they are at’ but when you meet so many you tend to stay right down there with them and forget about what is possible above the clouds in the land of truly gifted writing. When you get the rare gem of a student it is like a refreshing breeze of possibility. However, the curriculum likely restricts you from doing enough to challenge that student, because it is where the others need it to be. I feel k-12 has this problem a lot. Their solution to my kid has always been kick him up a grade, be it an entire grade or just the specific subjects where he allows himself to remain awake enough to be stimulated.
I suppose this is little more than a rant spurred by the upcoming football season that kicks off this weekend. We have high expectations for our teams, but I expect the games to end by forfeit at half time. It is where we’ve been for a long time and most recently we’ve been with a series of teams unable to force the 42-0 forfeit by half. We used to do it every game and I am about ready to get back to that.