You've heard it before. An older member of your family starts a lecture (you didn't ask for) about how "kids these days" get too much help from teachers, and how they "hold up the rest of the class." You yourself have probably witnessed it. There is always a kid who acts up and disrespects the teacher day after day, but somehow the teacher doesn't lose their cool. They want to keep teaching their student. Why?
Maybe it's because over 1.2 million students drop out of high school in the United States annually. Or maybe it's because teachers can see something we can't.
"ACEs", or "adverse childhood experiences" are experiences a kid has endured that impacted them so profoundly it stays with them into adulthood. These experiences can conjure depression, acts of violence, and mental illness in their victims.
The ACEs test is 10 questions long and measures experiences like abuse at home, drug addiction, mental illness in family members, and violence. One point is given for each type of emotional or physical trauma. Kids with a score of four are 1200 percent more likely to commit suicide than fellow students who don't have to deal with these issues. Children raised in homes with loving and supportive parents or guardians are proven to perform better on standardized tests, feel more content with friendships, and will most likely obtain high degrees than their student counterparts who've grown up in homes of neglect or violence.
Whether we like it or not, it's usually quite easy to pick these "problem" children from the crowd of high school students. I myself can recall a few I've noticed over the years that I know for a fact have problems at home.
In more than one way, the idea of teachers giving extra help to students who need it is similar to the argument of, "My parents beat me when I was a kid, and you don't see me crying about it. It taught me respect." Well, I'm glad you earned respect from being repremanded with a belt, but not everyone needs to get their little butt beat to a bright red to learn their manners. In fact, some of those kids who were taught manners in other ways have the same amount of respect that you have. If your kid does well in school, that's fantastic. If you are part of their success, give yourself a pat on the back, but you can't single out the kid who really needs a few extra minutes of explaining to understand the lesson.
Change for these students comes when they start to feel like maybe they could be worth something. Josh Shipp wrote, "Every kid is one caring adult away from becoming a success story", and he's right. So maybe these incredible teachers giving extra attention where it is needed isn't such a crime. Hell, it might even be better than leaving these kids in the dust. Maybe, just maybe, every kid is worth it.
