How Our Kindergarten Records Still Affect Us Today
Yours may be affecting you, too!
Yours may be affecting you, too!
“Does not play well with others” or “works well without supervision.”
Those words have shaped many a life.
School records follow you like a felony record.
Bad OR good, they stay with you. You can’t shake them easily.
Into the first grade, your school assessments prepare your all-important FIRST GRADE TEACHER on how to handle you- how to treat you in a way that is best for you, and how to treat you in a way that is best for the rest of the class.
After all, this first grade is your first real adventure into grown-up life. You are in a grown-up school now, with a grown-up class being taught by a grown-up teacher.
Some people think the primary grades are throwaways, but they are very formative. They can determine how we will act for the rest of our lives.
Does not play well with others.
This phrase may have just found its way into your file based on one bad day when your stupid sister bounced the dog's ball into your cheerios that morning.
It may mean business. Or it may not. Your kindergarten teacher may have had some serious halitosis, launching you into an introverted demeanor, like a pre-school recluse.
It could have been caused by any number of valid reasons but will follow you to the next grade and the next, shaping the expectations of each forthcoming group of educators on pre-expectations of how you will act.
And of course, this can easily last deep into the junior high school years where that kind of behavior is the norm and not out of the ordinary for every student of the school. Another life of underachievement is born.
Plays well without supervision.
This phrase could have just as easily or accidentally shown up on our permanent school records.
Here again, the comment could have been caused by a bad day, in which early, before school, you were happily playing with your plastic toy helicopter in the floor of your room, when your mom, feeling the pressure of the late hour, drop-kicked your helicopter across the room and into a wall killing all on board.
Perhaps a naturally sullen attitude may have reflected in your participation in a group activity at school that day.
Later in life
We need to face the idea that we cannot blame ALL of life's problems on these comments from kindergarten. We should not over-emphasize these as behavior patterns.
Not every “does not play well with others” will end up in prison doing a couple of decades of hard labor, any more than every “play well without supervision” will end up an entrepreneur or a politician.
But there is not enough area collected at this point to say categorically that that will NOT be the case.
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