This week’s Carnival of Education, hosted by The Ed Wonks, features two posts on differentiation.
The Chancellor’s New Clothes tells the story of a severely dyslexic student who succeeded in school with the help of note-taking aides but failed in his career because he can’t write.
The educational community failed my friend. We didn’t want him to feel bad about himself when he was in school, so we gave him a false view of his abilities. We decided that it was better for him to feel good about himself while in school and then be miserable for the rest of his life.
Differentiation is inevitable, writes Mathew Needleman.
I don’t quite understand how the notetakers were the problem that allowed the dyslexic student to pass his classes without learning to write. Notetakers take notes on classroom lectures; they don’t write the papers for the student.
On the other hand, is there something the schools could have done which would have made him a success afterwards, or would he have been a failure anyway?