Opinion
Student Well-Being Opinion

How School Can Make Students (and Teachers) Feel Dumb

Our brains don’t all work the same way
By Patrick O’Connor — June 28, 2022 4 min read
Image of support given to a student who is struggling.
  • Save to favorites
  • Print

I was projecting a document onto the whiteboard when a student in the back of the class leaned over to her friend, whispered something, and they both started to laugh, glancing up at me.

“What?” I asked.

They were silent.

“What’s so funny?” I asked again.

The girl pointed at the whiteboard. “You used ‘are’ instead of ‘our,’ Mr. O’Connor.”

“Oh, thanks!” I said. “I’ll fix it.”

This wasn’t the first time I had made such a mistake, and after class the girl walked over and stopped in front of me, seeming like she wanted to say something. “Yes?” I asked, thinking she might want to apologize for laughing at me.

“It’s just that …” She stopped, trying to find the right words.

“Go ahead,” I encouraged her.

“It’s just that I’ve never had an English teacher who couldn’t spell,” she said.

I was stumped. I wasn’t sure what to say. I told her I’ve tried my whole life to become a better speller. “I’ve dedicated many hours to improving my spelling, but my brain refuses to cooperate,” I said.

My ineptitude at spelling is the main reason I stay away from the whiteboard. I’ll write on it before class and I’ll write on it after class, but I avoid it like the plague during class. Being an English teacher who can’t spell is humiliating—and I do my best to hide this flaw.

But it’s not just writing; when speaking, I’m prone to malapropisms, I get tangled up in syntax, I lose my place in my thoughts, and sometimes I stutter. Language is an ever-replenishing fountain of shame—and no matter how often I aim for eloquence, my brain eventually reveals the tongue-tied, sentence-mangling, word-abusing fake under the mask.

Once in college, I was on a first date with a woman studying to get a doctorate in English. I was doing my best to sound intellectual, when a group of cyclists sped by as we walked down a sidewalk.

“Looks like the Tour de Force,” I said.

“What?” she asked, unsure if she heard me right.

“They look like the Tour de Force,” I repeated, oblivious of my verbal blunder.

“You mean the Tour de France,” she said, laughing.

I laughed with her, but inside I felt ashamed.

Years earlier, in the 1980s, I was at a Mets game with my uncle and his girlfriend when I pointed down at the field: “Look!” I shouted. “It’s Dave Kingman!” Then, I leaned over to my uncle and asked, “Hey, what’s Dave Kingman’s first name?” He laughed and told his girlfriend what I had just said, and later, when we got home, he told my father, who just shook his head; it wasn’t the first time his son said something foolish like this. I burned with shame.

Later, in the 6th grade, my teacher had asked the class a question and when no one answered, he said, “Come on! Even Patrick could answer this one!” Everyone laughed. I laughed! But, inside, I wanted to slip out of a window and disappear. Another time, my neighbor’s dad stopped me when my stutter wouldn’t allow me to complete a sentence. “You stuttering idiot,” he said.

There have been hundreds of other moments like this in which I felt like the idiot they said I was. Even after graduating from college with honors, earning a master’s degree in education, becoming a high school English teacher, and getting published as a writer, I still feel like the idiot they said I was. I don’t know how to shake the feeling.

Recently, I sat down with a student who wrote an essay on how school can make children feel dumb. He has a learning disability that slows down his processing and scrambles his thoughts. He needs space and time to absorb and pick his way through information, draw conclusions, and then reorganize and express his thoughts in a way he likes.

He told me school discourages individual ways of learning, thinking, and communicating.

He told me school discourages individual ways of learning, thinking, and communicating. Teachers look for standard forms, in writing and speech, he said. Standardized tests, he pointed out as an example, award students who can think quickly and can retain and recall information under pressure, but not all people have brains that work this way.

Such tests—and education as a whole—weed out students like him and leave them feeling stupid. Many of his friends, he said, dropped out for this reason. They just feel dumb.

I could have told him that I was one of those students, that I spent most of my high school years in a cloud of disorganized thinking, that I was blessed to discover literature (not in any classroom, but on my own), and through reading I learned to write well, and through writing I learned ways of thinking and organizing my thoughts. I could have told him that I still struggle with my own intellectual inabilities, and these perceived flaws make me feel stupid almost every day. I could have told him this is why he never sees me writing on the whiteboard, because I’m an English teacher who can’t spell.

Instead, I kept quiet and just listened. I praised his ideas and the way he expresses them, and said I always enjoy hearing his thoughts. And when he walked out of my classroom, I think he felt smart.

Related Tags:

Events

Teaching Profession K-12 Essentials Forum New Insights Into the Teaching Profession
Join this free virtual event to get exclusive insights from Education Week's State of Teaching project.
Jobs Virtual Career Fair for Teachers and K-12 Staff
Find teaching jobs and K-12 education jubs at the EdWeek Top School Jobs virtual career fair.
Mathematics K-12 Essentials Forum Helping Students Succeed in Math

EdWeek Top School Jobs

Teacher Jobs
Search over ten thousand teaching jobs nationwide — elementary, middle, high school and more.
View Jobs
Principal Jobs
Find hundreds of jobs for principals, assistant principals, and other school leadership roles.
View Jobs
Administrator Jobs
Over a thousand district-level jobs: superintendents, directors, more.
View Jobs
Support Staff Jobs
Search thousands of jobs, from paraprofessionals to counselors and more.
View Jobs

Read Next

Student Well-Being Student Well-Being Report Shows How Kids Are Doing in Education and Beyond
Student well-being has seen some progress, but education continues to decline.
5 min read
Students work together on an assignment about ecosystems and environmental impacts during a 7th grade science class.
Students work together on an assignment about ecosystems and environmental impacts during a 7th grade science class. Education continues to decline in the latest report on children's well-being.
Allison Shelley for All4Ed
Student Well-Being What School Leaders Learned When They Talked to Families About Absenteeism
A district enlisted its community to find out why students were missing school and responded accordingly.
5 min read
Image of a school bus driving on the road in the rain.
Willowpix/iStock/Getty
Student Well-Being Opinion Social Media Is Awash With Bad Health Advice. This Lesson Can Help
Why a librarian and health educator teamed up to teach students the red flags of misleading claims.
Nicole Murphy & Cynthia Sandler
4 min read
This image portrays a young woman deeply engaged with her smartphone, seen through a distorted, swirling blur effect. The artistic composition highlights the concept of doomscrolling, brainrot, digital addiction, social media immersion, and the modern reliance on technology. The surreal perspective creates a sense of detachment, illustrating how screens can shape and blur reality.
E+/Getty
Student Well-Being What RFK Jr.'s New COVID Shot Recommendations Could Mean for Students
The health and human services secretary said that annual COVID shots are no longer recommended for healthy children.
5 min read
Elsa Estrada, 6, smiles at her mother as pharmacist Sylvia Uong applies an alcohol swab to her arm before administering the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine at a pediatric vaccine clinic for children ages 5 to 11 set up at Willard Intermediate School in Santa Ana, Calif., Nov. 9, 2021.
Elsa Estrada, 6, smiles at her mother as pharmacist Sylvia Uong applies an alcohol swab to her arm before administering the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine at a pediatric vaccine clinic in Santa Ana, Calif., on Nov. 9, 2021. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has announced that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is no longer recommending annual COVID shots for healthy children.
Jae C. Hong/AP