In preparation for my son starting school next September I have spent a few mornings in the last month walking around local primary schools. I don’t think I am going to be fussy about where he goes. In my mind a school is a school, but there is one school that made me feel a little odd.
At this one particular school, as we followed our allocated pair of ten year old children around the corridors for the tour, I looked everywhere I could to help me get a feel for the school. We had been given a presentation prior to the tour from the headteacher and there was no doubt that the school was thriving academically. From the mature nature of the children showing us around, it seemed evident, as well, that the school produces some very independent and polite children, but I wasn’t interested in that.
I’m not sure what I was looking for exactly, but my eyes wondered to those display boards in the corridors, dutifully curated by hard-working teachers to show off the children’s interests and abilities. I am a creative person so perhaps it was art I was looking for; evidence that they encouraged creative expression and thinking beyond words and numbers. Something pretty, maybe.
As we turned the corner being led from one classroom to another, it was numbers in fact that had me feeling knots in my stomach: a high-score chart caught my eye. A leaderboard, styled like Guitar Hero, but for your times tables. On one side were the children’s names, followed by the points for each child in descending order of how well they can recite their times tables. I worried about the one kid at the bottom of that list. I wondered if their feeling mathematically incompetent was useful at all to their education? Had it been so affecting that they had attached that label to their identity.
My reaction to this interested me because my eldest child seems to be quite bright. Although I find this quite hard to tell without much opportunity for comparison, we were recently told at a parents’ evening that he was clever - quick to answer questions asked and keen to let everyone know he knows the answer. This wasn’t the first time we had heard this: a lady that looked after him at nursery when he was around 18 months old told me one day he was a genius. (He had managed to decipher the staff code for cake “C-A-K-E” and immediately demanded some).
My son may in fact be one of those children who would thrive off a high-score chart. I was one of those children, but weirdly the presence of this in the school wasn’t the dopamine hit it once was.
I was the kid in school that did well. I never put my hand up in but somehow the teachers always knew I knew the answer and would use me to move the lesson along. In very early primary school I remember being part of a clever kids club where a few of us were separated from the rest of the class and taught random facts. I think of it now as a mini QI experience, where our deputy headteacher, middle-aged with light grey curly hair was a predecessor for Alan Davies. I still remember one activity was to see how many times a piece of paper could fold. Seven times, in case you are interested. It didn’t go down well with the other kids, though and I’m not sure it made me many friends with names such as Clever Clogs, Boffin, Teacher’s Pet, Brain Box… you get the idea.
At school, children find difference and they can be cruel. As a parent, I just want my children to be average, normal and not stand out from the rest, whether they are so-called clever or academically challenged.
Kids love positive reinforcement and rewards. What better motivation for learning times tables is there than beating the score of someone else? It is a system we still thrive on as adults. On Instagram or Substack for example, it’s the numbers we hold on to. It may not be high-scores but high follower counts. How many subscribers and followers we have vs. someone else is important. The comparison is all ours to make but compare we do and the more the better. More is a mark of success, or so it seems.
I recently celebrated 100 subscribers and I am so grateful for you all. It is a great milestone for me to acknowledge and reflect on how much this newsletter has grown but my reach is still modest. If I were to contextualise my milestone on a leaderboard of every single Substack in existence I might not be so celebratory; my marker of success here may not be the same as someone else’s.
A leaderboard lacks context: it lacks the knowledge of how much something has improved or in the case of newsletters, how far the reach has grown. One publication’s 1000, may be the equivalent of another’s 100 and worthy of equal celebration. Similarly on a times table high-score chart, there is no context as to how hard a child worked for their score, or how much improvement was made since the last time. It is something you may perhaps only know on a personal level and can be hard to see from the outside.
Then there is the element of bias that a leaderboard might conjure. There has been much talk on Substack this week about the orange best-seller tick (for having one hundred paid subscribers) and the unfair advantage that gives already thriving publications. Substack is a social media platform we celebrate for not being ruled by an algorithm. Yes they might be successful in that they are of good quality and interesting, which is why they have many subscribers but the presence of a orange tick gives the potential subscriber a more positive lens in which to view the publication and is much more likely to subscribe to it. A subconscious bias similar to the one our Psychology teachers at school told us they wanted to avoid. They actively didn’t read their list of predicted grades for their prospective students, which each teacher is given at the beginning of the year. A bias I would have benefitted from if they had, which meant I had to work a lot harder to prove myself to them than I did in any other class.
Whether my children are top or bottom of the list, it bothers me that this list exists.
In primary school being the clever one was my identity. It continued to be my identity throughout my stint at grammar school. Whilst I wasn’t top of the class there, (a fact that took a while to get used to) I had some comfort in the fact that we were all top of the class by the very nature of being there. We had passed a test and proven we were smart: that was enough for me then. But in University, studying a subject that wasn’t academic, and where such talents were not praised or even acknowledged, I was no longer the best and I didn’t really know what I was.
In the years that followed University it took me a year of internships to get a proper full-time paid job. I felt a failure among my peers and a fraud in my family. I had been the clever one of the four of us, casting a shadow my three siblings had to live under, yet at that time they were earning good money and I wasn’t.
I worry that in being praised for my academic abilities so much when I was young, I had forged an identity that wasn’t sustainable. It existed in a world that I hadn’t realised wasn’t going to continue after my A-Levels, an identity that wasn’t going to last in the real world, especially in a career that celebrates creativity over everything else.
Ultimately I saw that high-score list and felt gutted for the kid at the bottom, how they must have felt and how they would probably be seen as the thick one in the class - but the fear for that person and the fact that I see that as a failing is probably more a reflection of me than the people who have made this leaderboard.
It is hard to deny that the number of subscribers and followers is a marker of success but it isn’t the only marker in much the same way that the high-score chart is not the only marker of a student’s abilities. A high score chart on the ability to recall times tables doesn’t show how good they may be at reading music or expressing themselves through art, yet it is one league table they are unlikely to forget if they are near the top or near the bottom.
If this resonated with you, I would love you to join me in the comments, I love to hear your experiences.
Do you find motivation in a high score chart?
Do you think such charts belong in schools?
How do you feel about the Substack orange ticks? Do you think they are useful or an unnecessary bias?
This is a brilliant article. I agree. It isn’t a good thing to be doing to children. Especially at such a young age.
Carol Dweck’s book Mindset speaks about how damaging the label of ‘clever’ can be. That it can generate a feeling of anxiousness as, all of a sudden, everything becomes a test. All the time you are testing whether you are ‘clever’ or not. If you are faced with a situation where this isn’t true it can feel very destabilising. She shares lots of research around education in it.
I’ve become a Governor at our school, so I can have a voice about things like this.
I hope you’ve found a good fit.
Also, hate the orange ticks!!
Really interesting article, thank you 😊. I now want to go back round the schools we looked at for Sept with different eyes 😂.
Comments from my dad about not being in top set maths have haunted me for 25 years. So I’m very keen to avoid that with my son. The haunting has also kept me moving on an upward curve (not sure what the mathematical term is) that I seemed to think was expected of me. Never quite satisfied. 2023 was the year of reckoning and I now have a different perspective.
I teach undergrads and the obsession with grades is real. What about the learning? How can I refocus their attention on the content and what happens in classroom exchanges, making connections to real world, and their reading and perspectives. It’s something I’m trying to bring to my Substack. I’m trying to think more about the engagement that’s happening there. And I suppose recognising my intention and motivation for being on Substack may differ from others.
I once went to conference and I was third from the top on the Twitter leaderboard. Success? Or actually someone feeling lonely at a conference seeking connection and to feel better.
Brilliant post, thank you.