Can we blame educators for perpetuating heightism?

Heightism

post #1

01-25-2017 at 09:52 am

I witnessed something very interesting in the classroom yesterday afternoon. I co-teach with this female educator, let's call her Nancy. During a lesson on the book "To Kill A Mockingbird", we staged a reenactment of one of the scenes from the reading via reinterpretation. We allowed the kids to draf a more "modern" script using more relevant present day scenarios. We allowed the kids to use props, but they were limited to items in the classroom.

Anyway, there were three kids in a group, all Middle School students. Two of the boys in this group were relatively tall for their age (about 5'9), the other 5'2-5'3. All of the kids in the group asked for an item that wasn't in the room, but downstairs in the auditorium. The smallest kid asked to go retrieve it. My co-teacher ignored the shorter student's request and sent both of the taller students to get the item.

The thing is I knew she did this because she imagined the taller students to be more capable, even though the shorter student articulated clearly from a point of knowledge that he knew what he would have to do. This was confirmed when I confronted her about it.

This has me wondering. Do we reinforce heightism from young age?

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