No above-average without average | LETTER TO THE EDITOR
Published 12:20 pm Thursday, April 28, 2016
To the editor:
I am grateful to Marilyn Price-Mitchell’s letter in the April 8 edition of the Bainbridge Island Review. The author focuses in powerful ways on the lack of diversity in our community’s definition of success while pointing to the current imperative to highlight “more authentic stories of ‘successful’ children and teens.” She goes on to detail the characters in such stories: “kids… overcoming challenges” and “supportive adults.”
As Dr. Price-Mitchell outlines so well, empathy and the hard work of inclusion make up authentic success stories. The story that the honor roll tells, in contrast, is a story of exclusion all too familiar to our students as well as to our student-athletes.
The push for the middle school and high school students of Bainbridge Island toward the values of exclusion exerts itself clearly twice a year in our local paper’s Honor Roll pages. Here you find a breakdown of grade points that gather together all students with a 4.0 grade point average for the semester in one category and those with grade point averages between 3.9 and 3.2 in another category. This division of grade point averages reflects a taxonomy of success whose logic is perfection: perfect grades are in a class by themselves and distinguish the students who earned them while the range of less than perfect grades and the range of students who earned them appear without distinction among them. Any one of children whose grade point average falls below 3.2 goes without distinction, and by extension, without honor. In other words the 3.0 or “C” would seem to have become for us so unsightly that we literally do not see them. Where is the C-average in The Review’s Honor Roll? There it is not, in stark black and white.
As a mother, and a marriage and family therapist I have seen the ill-effects of our community’s failure to see the average. The story we need to tell as supportive adults is one of radical inclusion. The story of radical inclusion includes chapters on learning the many ways in which we average humans exert and excel: by trying hard at what we find tedious and dull, by rising to the call of our passion, whether in school or in sports, and by finding curiosity within us when we have the good fortune to be in the company of someone very different from ourselves.
I regularly hear stories of students and athletes who simply “do not see” others because they are invisible to them socially. I have seen parents switch students or athletes from one class or team to another either to avoid certain students or athletes or to join with others. Year after year this means that the challenge to learn or play with diversely skilled students or athletes wanes. It also means building community takes a back seat to being socially comfortable.
At middle and high school ages social comfort and stasis reinforce everything — and all too often the sense that one is entitled to disassociate and exclude. As grown-ups it is our job to challenge the temporary values of exclusion by rank and to uphold values of radical inclusion by character: the gifts and the challenges that ground and sustain all of us as human beings connected to one another.
I applaud Dr. Price-Mitchell’s call to listening to and reporting about our children in new ways. The Review’s tradition of publishing the honor roll plays the role of the antihero in such stories, perpetuating a culture that leads our children toward the values of exclusion while bypassing the foundation of an ethical life. That ethical foundation lies in valuing and embracing the average along with above-average and below-average so that we might truly support all of our children, and one another.
DIANAH JACKSON
Bainbridge Island
