Who's Your Hippo?

Take a moment to watch this... It's a bit of video, now licensed so I can no longer embed it, that shows folks on a boat. Out from the shore comes something aimed at the boat like a massive torpedo, zooming at them with frightening speed. It suddenly rears up out of the water is revealed to be-- a hippe!


Surprise. If your idea of a hippo is a big lumbering fat creature, then discovering that hippos swim like rocket-propelled sharks may come as a shock and a surprise. When you see those ripples headed for your boat, you may not realize exactly what's going on.

Teachers can have their own classroom hippos. It's easy to assume that a student who is bad at one thing is similarly challenged in all things. And that can lead to some problems with expectations.

We often talk about expectations (or were taught about them) as if they're a controlling factor. If we expect Pat to be a math whiz, Pat will be a math hiz. But if we expect Pat to stink at math, Pat will stink. To some extent that can certainly be true, but there are other reasons to watch our expectations.

As human beings, we see what we expect to see. The hippo will not be affected at all by our ideas about how well it can swim, but our expectations about how well hippos swim will affect how well we understand the situation we're witnessing.

Our expectations can change how we handle the data. If we decide that Chris is a horrible person and we expect Chris to do nothing but horrible things, then when Chris saves a bus load of orphans and puppies from a fire, we'll explain it away. "Oh, Chris was just trying to show off and get attention."

If our hippo shows us it can swim, we can accept that information and alter our expectations about hippos, or we can explain it away. We do that with our classroom hippos. We expect Alex to be a huge jerk, so when Alex says something that might be considered nice, we assume there's some level of sarcasm in there. We expect Pat to stink at fractions, so if Pat does a great job on a fractions test, we may dismiss it as an aberration. In an elementary classroom, or a language classroom, where many different subject areas are involved, it's frighteningly easy to assume that low ability over here means low ability over there. I am ashamed to think of how many times in my career I was far too slow to understand that my classroom hippo was an awesome swimmer. A student who was such a rude jerk most days that I didn't see at first that he was really deeply concerned about the people in his own life. The student who couldn't write to save his life, but was a dynamic and engaging public speaker.

This is the real reason not to listen to information about your new students from their old teachers-- it's not that you'll expect them into some academic disaster, but that you might not be able to process the evidence with a clear head.

In my setting, that was nearly impossible, and I always knew many students by name and reputation before I actually met them. The challenge was to stay open to what they could show me about themselves.

That's the challenge in a new year. Keep your eyes open, keep your mind open, and watch out for the hippos.