On Jody Palmer

I find these story very touching and accidentally the name was also Jody Palmer, that’s why I decided to post the story here.

Hope you all like it.

What’s Wrong?

A newly trained teacher named Jody Palmer went to teach at a Navajo Indian reservation. Every day, she would ask five of the young Navajo students to go the chalkboard and complete a simple math problem from their homework. They would stand there, silently, unwilling to complete the task. Jody couldn’t figure it out. Nothing she had studied in her educational curriculum helped, and she certainly hadn’t seen anything like it in her student-teaching days back in Texas.

What I am doing wrong? Could I have chosen five students who can’t do the problem? Jody would wonder. No, it couldn’t be that. Finally she asked the students what was wrong. And in their answer, she learned a surprising lesson from her young Indian pupils about self-image and a sense of self-worth.

It seemed that the students respected each other’s individuality and knew that not all of them were capable of doing the problems. Even at their early age, they understood the sense of the win-lose approach in the classroom. They believed no one would win if any student became embarrassed at the chalkboard. So they refused to compete with each other in public.

Once she understood, Jody changed the system so that she could check each child’s math problem individually, without being in front of his classmates. They all wanted to learn-but not at someone else’s expense.