Re: failure and resistance

From: renee hayes (emujobs@hotmail.com)
Date: Wed Jun 20 2001 - 16:44:11 PDT

Hi, I normally lurk and since I've been feeling a bit guilty about it, and since this failure/resistance discussion speaks to me on a personal level, I am going to contribute a personal anacdote about my daughter.

We are from the US and moved to Spain one and a half years ago.  In the place where we live, there are not many immigrants, I guess, so no services to help kids in school who don't speak Spanish.  So my daughter just sort of went to school and sat in the classroom (she was 11, now 12 years old).  The idea was that she would eventually get the hang of the language and gradually start to participate as she learned.

 

But that's not at all what happened.  It was a curious pattern, because for the first few months she got nothing but praise from her teachers, because she was learning the language so quickly, and seemed eager to learn, etc.  Then things went downhill, and by the end of this school year in June she had failed the year, and her teacher described her as completely uninterested in learning and with an oppositional attitude.

 

How did this strange thing happen?  My interpretation is that she was very happy at school as long as she was able to perform better than was expected, this worked well when there were no expectations and when she could say "hola!" everybody praised her.  Then, as the expectations raised (rather suddenly, I think, because as soon as she could speak conversationally her teachers assumed she understood everything in the class.)  Her teacher reported that she seemed distracted and unattentive in class, and she reported to me that she was ashamed to participate in class because of her lack of fluency, and that she really didn't understand the lecture and was afraid to reveal that.  Then she told me that her teacher seemed not to like her, and she became angry with him, which only caused her to withdraw more.  I think for her it was better to seem bored and uninterested than to seem inadequate.

 

For me this is a classic case illustrating the complex interplay between failure and resistance, because in a strategy designed to hide her inadequencies, she helped create an atmosphere of animosity between her teacher and herself.  To make matters worse, my language skills were developing at the same time, and it was very difficult and intimating for me to try to speak with her teacher.  I tried a few times, because my feeling was that this was all a big understanding, and we could resolve it through better communication.  But my Spanish in the beginning just wasn't up to it, and towards the end of the year the relationship between him and my daughter and me (the shy, quite mom, which I am ANYTHING BUT in real life) had become so ingrained that it was hard to change.   

 

Maybe some day she and I will make a conference presentation together...:)

 

Renee

>From: Bill Barowy
>Reply-To: xmca who-is-at weber.ucsd.edu
>To: xmca who-is-at weber.ucsd.edu
>Subject: failure, resistance, development
>Date: Wed, 20 Jun 2001 06:22:53 -0700 (PDT)
>
>Having trouble keeping up with the volume and I'd like to write about a couple
>of terms we've been using so I understand them better. Failure and resistence.
>Both of these terms have usage as expressing values within a
>technocratic/meritocratic system as a school. Failing and the indentity formed
>in failing, I think, are elements of one process that B&G claim leads to class
>distinction -- we have lots of academic examples, such as with maths and
>reading: in the former which I know better, early experiences shape a persons
>self-efficacy and consequently what more math that person is willing to learn.
>Addressing the affective side of identity, I've encountered students with the
>'math anxiety' Sheila Tobias wrote about when I was teaching in an
>undergraduate basic math (remedial) program. As a result, I find there is
>substance to the idea that failure shapes what a person believes him/herself
>capable of accomplishing, and consequently what career decisions that person
>makes. With math, which is necessary for pursuing engineering, many of the
>students in the basic math program had already self-selected not to pursue
>technical degrees such as in engineering. Consequently, they also
>self-selected out of well-paying engineering jobs, and they enacted the
>re-production of the rough-grain class distinctions that accompany more
>fine-grained distinctions as profession-and-salary. But with one qualification
>-- the 'self-selection' is, I think, not entirely up to the individual, but
>occurs in the nexus of individual and social processes. For example, as a
>result of the basic math program experience, one (but only one that I know of)
>student decided to take additional math courses -- subsequent successes lead
>the student to pursue an engineering degree. The student was forced by the
>university system to take algebra as requirement for his degree. Taking the
>basic math classes, in light of the dearth of his prior merits in math, was an
>option that offered some chance of success with the algebra requirement. He
>chose to do so, but his decision was not only the consequence of his prior
>conditioning, but of the constraints and affordances society provided at that
>point in time.
>
>Resistance is something to unpack further -- in one view it would seem as a
>persons decision not to comply, and compliance, B&G claim, is the mark of a
>'good' middle manager, who, in a hierarchical and bureaucratic system, will
>carry out the charges of his/her supervisor. But I'll stop with this example,
>because time will only permit the sharing of a paragraph from a chapter by B&G
>in a later book entitled 'Bowles and Gintis revisited'.
>
>"...personal development is in general best served through an interaction of
>two stratetgies: exercising one's freedom to choose independently of collective
>sentiment, and entering into mutual, reciprocal, and participatory action with
>others to achieve commonly defined goals. These two strategies are precisely
>Albert Hirschman's twin notion of 'exit' and 'voice'." (p. 229)
>
>gotta run,
>bb
>
>
>=====
>"One of life's quiet excitements is to stand somewhat apart from yourself and watch yourself softly become the author of something beautiful."
>[Norman Maclean in "A river runs through it."]
>
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