Today is Labor Day. As my husband pointed out yesterday, that means today marks the unofficial end of summer. And certainly when we were growing up, that was the case because the arrival of Labor Day always coincided with the first day of school. Gone would be the long days that seemed to stretch on forever filled with whatever suited us. For me, Labor Day meant no more mornings working my way through my most recently acquired stack of books from the library or afternoons spent playing with friends in the neighborhood pool.

However, as we all well know, today most of our students have been in school for weeks now. Only a handful are enjoying their last days of freedom. More likely than not, many students are spending parts of their Labor Day completing homework assignments due in the week ahead. For these students, the endless days of summer ended weeks ago. All that remain of them are the hot temperatures outside. In fact, in the district where I used to teach, the students have probably spent their three days anxiously awaiting the arrival of progress reports due to arrive home next week. In fact, I feel safe in assuming that, for today’s students, Labor Day probably doesn’t represent the end of summer as it did for my husband and me. Instead, for them it is just another three-day weekend.

And so that leads me to think about the assumptions we make about students today because we often associate school and being a student with our own memories of what it was like to be students and attend schools. I think this is even more so for the general public than for those of us involved in education. How often have I heard the phrase “Well such-and-such worked for us when we were in school!” And I’ve often been told that teaching and education are often misunderstood because everyone thinks he/she is an expert on education since we have all had the experience of being students. As they reflect on their own schooling, people generally don’t stop to think that their experiences might be different from their friends’ experiences, let alone those of students today. This is what leads to the making of assumptions.

Even as educators, I think we easily slip into these assumptions if we’re not careful. I know I have often been guilty of super-imposing my own beliefs and experiences onto my students. In some ways, when we as educators do this it is even worse than when the general public does this because most of us became teachers because we enjoyed school. We had good experiences, probably because we did well, enjoyed our classes and teachers, and probably had a fair amount of support at home as well. (Yes, I do realize that when I make these statements I’m again making assumptions about the type of people who go into education.)

The problem, however, is that many of our students today, just like many of our own classmates, don’t like school in its traditional form. They have not all had good experiences with their teachers and classes. And in many cases, they don’t have the support at home for any one of myriad reasons. Therefore, when we try to create experiences for them that match those we remember with fond memories or as being particularly effective, we’re probably not providing the best learning environment for them that we possibly can.
Similarly, I don’t think it is too much of a stretch to think that when we think of our own experiences acquiring academic literacy, we might remember struggling a bit but eventually not having too much difficulty “getting it.” When we unconsciously superimpose our own experiences, we expect our students to have the same success. But as we all know too well, this is not the case.

The world our students live in today is different from the world in which we grew up. Most of us didn’t have the internet let alone cell phones, social networking sites like facebook or publicly-edited search engines like wikipedia when we were in high school. We didn’t read books online or keep track of current events on the computer. We couldn’t e-mail our teachers with questions about the homework or text message our friends during class. The types of writing students do today and the types of reading they do are vastly different from what we experienced. And so the skills students need and the way they learn those skills need to be different from what we needed and the way we were taught. Yes, there are some basic foundational skills and abilities students need that are the same, but as I said earlier, even these need to be taught differently than the way we learned them both because of the world in which our students live and because their experiences as students are very different from our own experiences. After all, for them, summer ended weeks ago, and Labor Day meant just another three-day weekend.