One of the signs I have posted at the front of my classroom states
“Fair” means “Everyone gets what they need,” not “Everyone gets exactly the same.”
I frequently have occasion to point & refer to that particular sign.
(Before you ask, yes, my incorrect use of “they” as a gender-neutral singular pronoun is with full knowledge aforethought.)
Here’s a personal example. Two years ago I was teaching a second-year high school chemistry class for kids who were academically low level. About 1/3 of the class was on IEPs, and probably another 1/3 should have been. After making a separate version of a test I was giving for the kids whose IEPs required that the problems be broken down for them, I had the revelation that about 1/2 of the class could execute the problems but had difficulty setting them up, and the other half could set up the problems, but many of them would make mistakes in the execution. Very few could do both.
I made two versions of the test, and decided beforehand which student should get which version. I gave the kids a pep talk before handing out the tests, explaining that there were two versions, what the difference between the two versions was, and that I was giving each student the version that I thought he/she would do better with, and that if I was mistaken, a student was welcome to ask for the other version. Two kids out of 50 asked for the other test, and most of the kids were able to demonstrate a reasonable level of competence in doing the particular subset of tasks required on their test.
Several kids thought this was incredibly fair. Not one kid gave any indication at all that he/she thought it was unfair.
In short, if kids think school is unfair, it’s probably because we’re applying a “one size fits all” approach, because that happens to be more convenient for us as teachers.
Originally posted to the ChemEd-L discussion list.
