On Teaching: "Caricatures"

When we teachers describe students at meetings, I sometimes feel like we are inadvertently creating caricatures of the students instead of genuine portraits of them. According to one dictionary, a caricature is a “false ... or impudent imitation of something”, a definition that unfortunately might fit some of our descriptions of students during these meetings. When he talk about kids, it seems to me that we create a picture of them that is tidy, neat, and convenient, but that often has very little to do with the actual reality of their lives. We might as well draw a quick sketch of a student and then claim the sketch tells us a lot about the student. What bothers me most is that we don’t usually seem to be aware that we are doing this. Most of us seem to believe that we are actually capturing the essence of the students when we discuss them – that our words and phrases about them reveal their true natures as students. We put labels on the students, and we apparently believe that the labels accurately identify and reveal them. In this connection, I like the word “impudent” in the above definition, because I believe it is impudent of teachers to pretend to capture the reality of their students during meetings in which labels are conveniently used and judgments are quickly passed. It’s like looking at the Grand Canyon and then “labeling” it in a few sentences. Our students are all human Grand Canyons, and they deserve thoughtful, professional, and humble treatment from us. We need to stop making caricatures of our students and start describing the depth of the riches their lives.