On Being "Mean"

I feel like I'm going out a bit on a limb here with the topic of this post which was instigated by reading an article in today's Scotsman about how Scottish researchers at Strathclyde University have found that:

Teachers who are overly sympathetic to children with learning difficulties or physical disabilities can hold them back in the classroom.
....
teachers who did not feel "overwhelmed with sympathy" were more likely to challenge disabled pupils, and to expect more from them.

The report also found that attitudes of teachers towards children with learning difficulties were not improved by training programmes.

199 Scottish teachers were accessed regarding their "levels of sympathy" and "classroom attitudes," in order to evaluate how the policy of mainstreaming is working in schools in Scotland. It was found that

....teachers who did not feel overwhelmed with sympathy "saw the children's difficulties as less stable and therefore more amenable to change".

"A person who feels a great deal of sympathy may respond to the disabled individual differently from non-disabled people," it said.

"If a teacher sees a learner as not being in control, the teacher is more likely to provide help. If help is provided on a task that the learner does not see as challenging, the help could be interpreted as . . . transmitting to the learner the message that they are of low ability and likely to need help."

The study is not about "being mean," of course, but about the extent to which teachers feel "overwhelmed with sympathy," and about how this feeling affects their teaching. I'll hazard that one can replace "sympathy" with "feeling sorry": Teachers who feel sorry for a student's for being disabled were more likely to rush to "provide help," without having a child try something challenging on her or his own and, too, without figuring out how to teach that child to do something challenging on her or his own. Having too much sympathy can, it's suggested, be presumptive, as it may well involve a teacher feeling that a child who's "so disabled" just can't do some task (reading, talking, brushing her or his teeth, etc.), and "being nice" and doing it for her or him.

In our own experience with Charlie's education, teachers and therapists, it's been the case that teachers who've been willing to challenge him and be "harder"----and so seem "meaner," because the immediate response in Charlie was not necessarily to be too thrilled---have been the most effective. Further, they've been the teachers and therapists whose names Charlie has said over and over and who he's remembered the best. However demanding, stringent and, yes, "mean" these teachers and therapists may have seemed at the moment, in the long run, they've often been the most sympathetic and humane, because they knew that Charlie could learn; because they truly believed in him.

"Meanness" is, perhaps, only a surface phenomenon.