Three weeks into my first year of teaching, I stood in front of my 10th grade class, staring at a stack of map quizzes in disbelief. My students — 95% Latino, primarily Mexican — had just taken a basic world geography quiz. Only 10% could find Mexico on a map. Half couldn't even locate the United States.
I walked into the counseling office, dejected. How could I possibly teach these kids about environmental degradation when they couldn't even find their own countries on a map?
My mentor teacher saw me and immediately recognized the look of a new teacher facing reality. He planted one foot on a stool, leaned over his knee, and delivered what he thought was sage wisdom: "Jose, if you're going to survive teaching, you've got to understand one thing. You can't make chicken salad out of chicken s**t."
He thought he was offering me absolution. What he was really offering was a path to mediocrity I refused to take.
The Absolution Trap
I felt ugly after that conversation. Little did my mentor know, I had been "chicken s**t" myself when I was a kid. If not for a teacher who stood between me and my bad decisions, I could have stayed that way. I realized that my mentor didn't really know how to teach. He had no pedagogy, no strategies to share with me. Nobody did. All he could offer was absolution – freedom from responsibility for my students' failures.
And the absolution was everywhere, offered at every turn:
Middle school didn't prepare these kids. I'm absolved.
Their parents don't care. I'm absolved.
It's not in my contract. I'm absolved.
I don't get paid enough for this. I'm absolved.
I watched teacher after teacher accept this absolution and lower their expectations. Meanwhile, students were watching and learning exactly what we thought of them. When I walked into faculty lounges and heard colleagues complaining about students, I recognized that they were often projecting their own frustrations. "These kids don't care about learning" usually meant the teacher had stopped caring about teaching.
The Will, Not Just the Skill
Within a few weeks of that pivotal conversation with my mentor, I was standing in front of my class asking Guillermo a simple question.
"Guillermo, when did Christopher Columbus arrive in America?"
"I don't know," he mumbled, avoiding eye contact.
"You know what, Guillermo? I think you do know, and I'm going to wait."
The class grew uncomfortable as the silence stretched. One minute passed. Then another. Students shifted in their seats, but I stood my ground. I waited for twelve full minutes while the tension built.
Finally, Guillermo broke. "1492," he said quietly.
"So you do know! I knew you knew it," I said. "I know you're brilliant, but I need you to bring it out."
Most teachers move on when a student says "I don't know." They don't have the will to wait — even when they know the student has the skill to answer. I met with Guillermo after class, and I told him that I wasn't trying to disrespect him. He sheepishly said he knew — and over the course of the year he became one of my best students.
What I discovered with Guillermo and countless other students was that respect mattered more than grades. Students will protect their dignity at all costs. They'll fail your class before they'll let you disrespect them. That's why I learned to be direct but never condescending. I wouldn't ask rhetorical questions designed to shame them. I'd simply create the conditions where they could succeed, then refuse to let them settle for less.
The Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations
Two months into my first year as a principal, district officials appeared at my school. I thought they were there to see the wonderful work that we were doing. One woman asked skeptically, "Should you really be an A-G school? Do you really feel that everyone should go to college?" In California, A-G requirements are the courses students need to complete to be eligible for state universities. Most schools in low-income communities struggle to get even half their students to complete them.
I pushed back hard. "You would never question whether students in affluent neighborhoods should be prepared for college. But when it comes to brown and black kids, suddenly the curriculum is 'too hard.'"
They never came back.
When you raise expectations, people get uncomfortable. But when we implemented standards-based grading combined with restorative practices at my school, the results spoke for themselves: 99% graduation rate and 98% A-G completion. In other words, 98% of our students could go to college if they chose to.
"We must end the soft bigotry of low expectations." I may not have agreed with President George W. Bush on much, but this quote resonates deeply with me.
Paying Forward What Was Given to Me
I ran into my old mentor recently, decades after that pivotal conversation. He casually remarked, "Not everyone should go to college." I thought about how many of my former students — those who might have been written off as "chicken s**t" — are now college graduates, teachers, and leaders.
I had a great teacher who refused to let me off the hook when I was the "chicken s**t" kid in school. He wouldn't let me get away with acting below my potential, and he saw intelligence in me that I hadn't yet recognized in myself. He showed me what grace looked like in action.
I was told many times to accept the things I couldn’t change. I began to change the things I could no longer accept. If our students decided not to go to college, that was their choice. Nobody was going to decide for them. Many of my students who were dismissed as hopeless are now the ones making the biggest difference in their communities. They succeeded not because I lowered the bar — but because I refused to accept that they couldn't clear it.
To bring this high-expectations approach to your school through a keynote or workshop, contact me. Let's transform student potential together.
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