This was a fantastic story, shared and created by Michael Wesch:
What I loved about this was the idea that sometimes our perceptions of students, lead to their new reality. If we think of a student as lazy, what things do we do that actually feed into that? But if we look for their strengths and how to build upon them, that perception also becomes a reality.
This is one of my favourite images on that very topic, most likely inspired by the Einstein quote,
“Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by it’s ability to climb a tree, it will live it’s whole life believing that it is stupid.”
If we hold a certain knowledge that others don’t hold, it doesn’t make us smarter than them. It just means that we have different strengths. In the mechanic that doesn’t have a high school degree, yet can fix my car, I see genius. Finding that genius is part of what great educators do.