While this is something that I think is commonplace in many teachers' thinking, and in fact may seem completely self-evident, I believe it is something we teachers should work to remove from our vernacular. If this is something you've found yourself saying, please realize that I'm coming from a place of understanding, and not one of vilification. As I said, I've been guilty of adopting this way of thinking, so I "get" why people say this phrase and ones like it. I hope that I can lay a compelling a case for what makes it faulty however.
What was this insidious phrase? Simply this:
"The world still needs its ditch diggers."
I should perhaps clarify that the person who used the phrase wasn't exactly the youngest of educators, so his use of the term "ditch digger," while a bit dated, could be replaced with any sort of menial labourer that is stereotypically performed by the poorly educated: trash collector, janitor, letter carrier, taxi driver, etc.
I suspect that I do not even need to contextualize the conversation in order for the average teacher to surmise what was discussed. Nonetheless, here is a rough synopsis: "These students are failing to meet my standards. I have tried everything to turn them around, but many of them just don't seem to pick up what I'm putting down. Oh well. I guess the world still needs its ditch diggers, right?"
It seems a pretty straight forward sentiment. It's roughly equivalent to the notion that you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink, right? Wisdom that has stood the test of time. Except that I'm of the opinion that these times might need a changin'. Here's ultimately what I think the "ditch digger" statement really means:
"Some kids are smart, hard working, and successful. Some are less so. No matter what we do as educators, that will always be true. The world will always have roles for people who can't succeed in school, so it's really not so bad that some kids, in fact, don't succeed. If everyone was successful, who would dig the ditches (or salt the fries, or take away the trash, or clean the floors, etc.)?"
I suspect that I do not even need to contextualize the conversation in order for the average teacher to surmise what was discussed. Nonetheless, here is a rough synopsis: "These students are failing to meet my standards. I have tried everything to turn them around, but many of them just don't seem to pick up what I'm putting down. Oh well. I guess the world still needs its ditch diggers, right?"
It seems a pretty straight forward sentiment. It's roughly equivalent to the notion that you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink, right? Wisdom that has stood the test of time. Except that I'm of the opinion that these times might need a changin'. Here's ultimately what I think the "ditch digger" statement really means:
"Some kids are smart, hard working, and successful. Some are less so. No matter what we do as educators, that will always be true. The world will always have roles for people who can't succeed in school, so it's really not so bad that some kids, in fact, don't succeed. If everyone was successful, who would dig the ditches (or salt the fries, or take away the trash, or clean the floors, etc.)?"
As products of a system that consistently produced bell curves, and as students who typically landed on the happy side of those curves when we were young, we teachers are well conditioned to accept the "truth" of this notion. What research tells us, however, is that bell curves don't always tell the correct tale of a student's potential later in life, and the notion that they serve our students and our society well holds very little truth at all. So with that in mind, I present...
4 Reasons Why Teachers Should NEVER Apply the Ditch Digger Excuse to Their Students
1. Ditch diggers?? Do we REALLY need ditch diggers??
Firstly, I have to pick on my colleague's choice of labourer here. I found it particularly ironic that they chose "ditch digger" as the job that the world still apparently is in need of. There is literally no such thing as a ditch digger any more, at least not in the developed world. Historically, a ditch digger was the person tasked with the ignominious job of digging out a latrine used by soldiers who were making camp. Our modern definition of ditch (a drainage channel beside a path or roadway) would typically be formed as part of the larger task of creating a road. I sincerely doubt that road construction crews have a specialized role for this one task. Even if they do, then I suspect that person requires the prerequisite skill of being able to operate some heavy machinery effectively -- a task that would require specialized training and skill in order to perform effectively. Thus, it actually cannot be done by the utterly uneducated.
As it turns out, the world, in fact, doesn't really need ditch diggers. Granted, my colleague could have used a more relevant and current stereotype, perhaps a fast food clerk. The point I'd like to make here is that in the developed world careers have been steadily evolving away from menial forms of labour. Factory work done by people in the early 1900s gave way to automated assembly lines. Clerical work done by people in the middle of the century has given way to software handled by computers. Today, outsourcing and various forms of automation reinforce the notion that the world (or at least the developed world), in fact, simply doesn't need "ditch diggers" nearly as much as it needs critical thinkers, strong communicators, innovative problem solvers, and effective collaborators. Schools that produce graduates capable only of digging ditches (or serving fries) serves neither the graduates nor the society of which they are a part.
In it's most basic and literal context "the world still needs its ditch diggers," is more false than it has ever been.
In it's most basic and literal context "the world still needs its ditch diggers," is more false than it has ever been.
2. It actually means "I can't help you."
As I mentioned earlier, I used to use the Ditch Digger Excuse in my own practice, so believe me when I say that I get it. While I'd like to think that I used more updated phrasing perhaps, ultimately it was the same sentiment. For me, it might have gone something like this: "I hope that kid doesn't mind asking folks if they 'want fries with that.' He's going to be saying it a lot." This is maybe a more modern and cheeky phrasing, but it's saying the same essential thing: "That student is on the path to failure, and there's nothing I can do about it."
What I've come to realize about the moments when I used that type of sentiment, however, is that they were less a lament over a student's inability to perform and more a surrender of my responsibility to effect change. It was a cop out, my excusing an inability or an unwillingness to try something different or go in another direction. "My approach is working for all the other students, so obviously the problem is with this kid, and not with me, right?" I have since come to recognize that using the Ditch Digger Excuse had less to do with student performance and more to do with teacher performance... my performance. It would have been frankly more honest to say "I give up."
Does this mean that I think that if a teacher is unable to turn a struggling student's fortunes around that it is evidence of his failure as an educator? Probably not. I'm simply saying that using the fact that there are jobs in the world for people who don't succeed in school as justification for acceptance of student failure is the wrong mindset. To put it simply, we should never be okay with student failure.
3. What if your child was handed the shovel?
At its heart, the Ditch Digger Excuse dehumanizes children. It reduces them to an imaginary role in an imaginary future where uneducated folks are handed shovels and told to dig. When a teacher suggests that "the world still needs its ditch diggers" as justification for soldiering onward with her content, her lecture, her test, or her worksheets while students flounder and fail, she's essentially saying "I'm comfortable with handing you your shovel right here and now."
I suspect that if a teacher was told that her own child was destined for "the ditches," that teacher would move Heaven and Earth to deflect her son or daughter from a path of menial labour. Yet I have seen (and ignorantly participated in) countless forms of dehumanization of other parents' children by using this and similar turns of phrase so cavalierly. Our students are not the jobs we imagine for their futures. They are not the grades we assign them. They are not the canned comments we send home about them on their report cards. They are not an attendance record, a behavioural code, or an IPP (IEP) file. We owe it to them as human beings to treat them in all ways as people, and we must regard their futures as something as precious to us as it is to them and their parents.
Granted, some of our kids may grow up to work low paying jobs as uneducated labourers. But while they are in our classes, our moral obligation is to keep searching for ways to help them identify their gifts and strengths and to teach them how to use those to chart a better course. If they do find themselves one day holding the proverbial shovel, it should be in spite of our efforts, and not because we handed it to them back when they were still children.
4. Some of those ditch diggers become doctors.
I sometimes encounter a sense from some of my fellow teachers that if students don't learn a particular thing in a particular year, they will simply never be able to learn it at all. I have found sentiments like the following reasonably commonplace:
"Kids need to have practice with test taking so that they've got a chance when they get to high school."
"If he doesn't learn how to get himself to class on time, how will he ever hold down a job one day?"
"Do you think your future boss is going to let you submit work after a deadline? You don't get second chances out there in the real world, so you shouldn't expect them here."
"If these kids don't develop some study habits, they'll never even make it past their first year of college."
I'm not going to pretend I've never made statements like these. Far from it. I can't count the number of times I've tried to cajole some measure of activity from my students by threatening them with future doom and gloom if they failed to strictly adhere to my obvious wisdom. But the notion that students can only learn a particular skill, attitude, or mindset while they are in grade school, and that failing to do so at a young age will necessarily result in failure later in life, is absolutely absurd. Just as necessity is the mother of invention, it is very often also the best teacher.
That there is a strong average correlation between high school grades and college grades is clear. However, as Todd Rose reminds us in his book The End of Average, group correlations do not translate into individual correlations. Just because the average student who does poorly in grade school tends to do poorly later in life doesn't mean they all do.
Social media is a very handy tool for maintaining contact with students well after graduation, and the number of students I know personally who have surprised their parents and former teachers by earning a college diploma or a degree after struggling in high school frequently astonishes me. In his book, Rose describes his own challenges in high school, departing with a D minus average, later becoming a straight A college student, and then later still, a world renowned researcher and author. Many struggling kids do indeed go on to become struggling adults, but a significant number do not. We simply can't predict what effects maturity, life's necessities, and different environmental circumstances will have on a future adult by looking through the lens of her childhood.
Social media is a very handy tool for maintaining contact with students well after graduation, and the number of students I know personally who have surprised their parents and former teachers by earning a college diploma or a degree after struggling in high school frequently astonishes me. In his book, Rose describes his own challenges in high school, departing with a D minus average, later becoming a straight A college student, and then later still, a world renowned researcher and author. Many struggling kids do indeed go on to become struggling adults, but a significant number do not. We simply can't predict what effects maturity, life's necessities, and different environmental circumstances will have on a future adult by looking through the lens of her childhood.
The point here is that we have future university graduates among those students who teachers might relegate to "the ditches." We justify their outcomes by pointing to the successful kids and asking "if these students can achieve, it must be the fault of the failing ones who can't." It may by the case that the reasons why a particular student struggles are outside a teacher's control. But it may be equally true that our approach as educators bears some of the blame for excluding certain students from academic success. And unless we can at the very least acknowledge that fact, instead of resigning ourselves to the notion that it's perfectly acceptable for a school system to produce adults capable of little more than wielding a shovel, we simply aren't doing the jobs we were hired to do.
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There are many reasons why the Ditch Digger Excuse and its many variants are commonplace. One of the most significant is education's systemic drive for efficiency. Taylorism pervades our organizational hierarchies, which inherently pushes us toward a one-size-fits-all model for instructional practices. This is in spite of a wealth of educational research and discourse that encourages differentiation and personalization for our students. While individual teachers may be finding ways to connect with individual students, our systems and logistics frequently oppose personalization. Ballooning class sizes, academic streaming, fixed pacing, centralization of curricula and resources, school design, our appetite for discreet and quantifiable data, and other organizational artifacts often push teachers and schools towards the normalizing of our children.
Normalization tells us that there is a bell curve of ability and thus accepts that some students will inevitably be on the bottom end of the curve. The Ditch Digger Excuse is just one product of this broken philosophy. We teachers can help replace it with a philosophy that recognizes the potential in every child and continuously works to draw it out individually, child by child. One of the steps on this journey is to put to rest the notion that the world still needs its ditch diggers.
Vive la revolution.
****
There are many reasons why the Ditch Digger Excuse and its many variants are commonplace. One of the most significant is education's systemic drive for efficiency. Taylorism pervades our organizational hierarchies, which inherently pushes us toward a one-size-fits-all model for instructional practices. This is in spite of a wealth of educational research and discourse that encourages differentiation and personalization for our students. While individual teachers may be finding ways to connect with individual students, our systems and logistics frequently oppose personalization. Ballooning class sizes, academic streaming, fixed pacing, centralization of curricula and resources, school design, our appetite for discreet and quantifiable data, and other organizational artifacts often push teachers and schools towards the normalizing of our children.
Normalization tells us that there is a bell curve of ability and thus accepts that some students will inevitably be on the bottom end of the curve. The Ditch Digger Excuse is just one product of this broken philosophy. We teachers can help replace it with a philosophy that recognizes the potential in every child and continuously works to draw it out individually, child by child. One of the steps on this journey is to put to rest the notion that the world still needs its ditch diggers.
Vive la revolution.
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