Let’s examine these dastardly equivocations further.

First, ‘positive’ used as a cover for educator naivete.  The idea that all children are good if they are touched by the right educator with a positive attitude and that any student can be ‘turned around’ with the right loving care and miracle pedagogy handed down from the University Research gods is naiive.  Certainly, students can be influenced for the good.  Certainly, a good teacher is better than a bad one.  But the root causes of current demise in education are hardly due to non-loving teachers, bad pedagogy, and a negative attitude towards students.  This belief, in fact, is in the process of  killing off what remains of American education.      

Do Ipods Make You Smarter than This?

To illustrate this, let’s imagine  (and I mean imagine) that negative thinking and attitudes on the part of teachers are one of the principle causes of poor education; let’s then imagine this problem being repaired. So, suddenly we will get a crop of teachers with a positive attitude, countrywide, that will solve this problem of students not learning due to the negative attitude of their teachers. 

As I say in my book Classroom Discipline 101, wrong premises lead to wrong conclusions.  If your premise is that students are performing poorly because their teachers don’t know how to teach and aren’t positive, you are going to try to solve the problem by fixing the wrong premise-by trying to make everyone somehow ‘positive’.

What’s the plan if you go with that premise?  Certify Principals in positivity training, then make sure every teacher nation-wide is screened for a positive-attitude test?  What will this test look like?

Question #1:  Johnny is failing Algebra.  He is in 10th grade but only working at 6th grade level.  He is absent once or twice or three times a week.  Why is he failing?

1. He has nowhere near the skills to achieve what he is supposed to at this level.
2. His past teachers displayed a negative attitude towards him.
3. His current teacher does not have a positive attitude and doesn’t care enough about him.
4. He has problems at  home that need to be countered with a positive attitude at school.
5. Johnny sensed the negative attitude of the teacher thinking he may not be able to do algebraic equations well when he couldn’t multiply 6 x 12, leading to his discouragement because of the teacher’s preconceived notion of what Johnny could and could not accomplish.  Had the teacher said ‘Hey! You don’t need any skills to enter this course, I can not only provide you with the skills you are missing from the last four years, not only reconnect synapse functions which are missing from your lack of intellectual brain stimulation for the last 8 years, but fill the class with the positive aura that comes from my positivity and faith in you which will turn around a lifetime of poor habits, but through the force of my positivity make you achieve, achieve, achieve!  Now, we need a bit of research-based technique also, so watch the smoke and mirrors as I throw in a little scaffolding!  Abracadabra, voila!’

Wow, if we can just replace all of the big meany negative teachers currently ruining the system through their lack of magical thinking and positive intent with teachers like these, attitudes will turn around and we will once again sit atop the world as the educational leader!  After all, all other countries with high achieving students do it by positive thinking…don’t they?

(to be continued)

There is a lot of talk about being ‘positive’ these days in educational circles.  But with all of this ‘positivity’ going around, why, by all appearances, do things seem to be getting worse as far as student attitude and achievement is concerned?  Why are students responding to all of this ‘positivity’ by becoming increasingly rude, disrespectful, defiant, socially inept, and academically inferior?  Why do I receive emails daily about the increasingly poor behavior and performance of students?

How could such a ‘positive’ culture entertain such negative results?  Could it be that what is being labeled as ‘positive’ is by no means positive?  I’m going to propose just that. 

The word ‘positive’ and ‘positive’ as a concept is being seriously equivocated by educators—that’s to say, what is being called positive is largely used as a cover for naivete, wishful/magical thinking, logical contradiction, and as a substitute, abstract smokescreen to hide the lack of achievement going on in schools by redefining reality to satisfy politically correct objectives (I will note here that politically correct objectives are signaling the death of our school systems as students and teachers suffer ridiculous policies, programs, and mandates for the sake of appearances, profits to useless entities endemic to education).

It is also used as a cover for plain academic laziness:  it is easier to talk about being positive than it is to demand hard, persistent, rigorous academic achievement from students. None of these things are positive, yet they are enjoying the cover of that misnomer like a shiny wrapper hiding a poison pill.  Like a smiley slick used car salesman quick-talking to distract you from looking inside the hood at the crummy, rusted engine.  Like a magician using sleight of hand to make failure disappear.  That is called redefining reality, not positivity. 

Here’s an example of redefining reality.

We are watching a basketball game.  A player takes a shot and misses by 3 feet.  You say that it was actually a good shot if you consider not making the basket not the essential here, but the effort involved, the style of shooting, that making a basket isn’t as important as the way it is thrown, that the basket simply wasn’t big enough,  if it were a larger basket the shot would have gone in, and that I don’t understand that the player has not had the background and opportunities of the other players on the court.  This is not positive talk, it is nonsense, redefining reality for your own ridiculous reasons.

I say, ‘Nah, actually, that was just a lousy shot.’  You can now point out how negative I am.  But who is negative here?  By denying or redefining reality, you cannot help that player achieve better in the future.  You will make a basket 3 feet bigger.  Next time he will miss it by four feet.  Pretty soon you can just redefine the rules to say that if the ball hits anywhere in the court it’s a good shot.

This is where education, at least where I teach, stands. 

When you are the one being ‘positive’ you can easily take the moral high ground no matter how incompetent a teacher or administrator you happen to be; you can criticize anyone with objections to your false sunny-arity as ‘negative’ and label them as the bad guy or gal.

Suppose we’re about to take a trip in a truck with a nice new paint job.   I tell you the truck’s engine is rusted out, the tires are flat, the pistons warped, and the car won’t make the trip, and you criticize me for being negative. 

I tell you my students are ill-equipped to do the work required of them for a certain course because they lack the requisite skills which take years to acquire and you can dismiss that as negativity.

(more on this topic later)