Every Child Needs a Champion
“Kids don’t learn from people they don’t like.”
This is just one of Rita Pierson’s statements that is funny, insightful, and right on the target. She was responding to a colleague’s comment that, “They don’t pay me to like kids; they pay me to teach the kids. I teach; they should learn. Case closed.” Except, as Rita explained, “Kids don’t learn from people they don’t like.”
At the core of Rita’s educational and pedagogical philosophy is one simple but powerful conviction: education is about connection. It’s hard to learn if you don’t feel connected. Which means that kids don’t just need a teacher, they need a champion, someone who believes in them, invests in them, nurtures in them the belief that they can be more than they are, that all kinds of things they don’t imagine are possible.
My favorite story of many stellar moments in this eight-minute TED Talk? When Rita, a professional educator since 1972, explains why she put +2 on a failed twenty-question exam instead of -18. Actually, it wasn’t Rita who explained this, but the student who received it: “-18 sucks the life out of you; +2 says ‘I ain’t all bad’.” 🙂
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