In a class I’m currently taking, we have been discussing why labels are so harmful for students with exceptionalities, differences and disabilities, but I think labels are harmful for all students.  For this story, I’ll need to go back to the origin story of my name.  My parents gave me the initials, LEC.  From an early age, my parents told me I should find and marry a boy named Ben Ho, so that I would become “Ho LEC”.  In Cantonese, the word for smart is pronounced “lek”, and adding a “Ho” in front means “very”, so “Ho LEC” meant very smart.  On the other hand, “Ho Ben” in Cantonese meant “very dumb” so my parents loved telling this story to me all the time in jest.

In school, I would soon fulfill this label, not only because it was expected of me, but also because I benefited from small class sizes by attending an all-female private school where I got a lot of attention from teachers.  I was a test taking maven, and aced the SATs to earn a National Merit Scholarship, and eventually had my pick of universities.  I turned down a Chancellor’s Scholarship at UC Berkeley, turned down Stanford because I didn’t want to be so close to home and chose MIT, one of the top schools in the world and located a plane ride away from home.  I graduated at the top of my high school class and as the valedictorian, delivered a hopeful speech about Y2K to my fellow classmates in 1999.

There’s a saying at MIT that learning there is like drinking from a firehose, and that’s exactly what I did.  I had taken so many Advanced Placement classes in high school that I skipped out of the introductory science classes my freshman year and took the next classes in the sequence.  Since my entire first year was graded as Pass / No Record, I took a heavier than usual course load.  I decided to major in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science because it was a hot field to be in and I loved my programming classes in high school.  There was also a masochistic ethos on campus, with students often saying, “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” so in the blur of the next several years, I got crushed with classes in algorithms, linear algebra, differential equations and several lab classes, one of which was fondly called, “Digital Death.”

My label of being the smart kid disintegrated as many of my peers were not only math and science olympiad winners, but also valedictorians from their respective schools.  I struggled to find friends I could work with, as the immense pressures led some to simply meet in groups to copy each other’s homework.  I wouldn’t cross that line, so I suffered in isolation and prayed I wouldn’t flunk out of school.  I wish I had the courage to switch TA sessions, but instead, I stayed with a section leader that I could barely understand through his thick foreign accent.  I tried taking copious notes and memorizing formulas.  I counted on partial credit to barely pass my classes.

Funnily enough, I did meet a Ben Ho while at MIT, who was not in fact dumb, and eventually went on to earn seven degrees between MIT and Stanford and is now a professor of Economics.  He brought me a rose on our first date, but alas, fate did not make me a Mrs. Ho.

As I prepare to become a teacher, I’m fascinated by how we learn, and I’m grateful for the body of work that has been done around the Growth Mindset.  When I finally graduated, I thought I would never go back to school.  When I reflect back on my transition from high school to college, I realize that pride kept me from seeking the help I needed to succeed.  Having been labeled smart, I relished the opportunity to skip over the intro classes that probably would have been beneficial in my transition to a larger campus.  I went from a graduating class of around 30 high school seniors to a class of more than 1,000.  This summer, I will be returning to MIT for my 20th college reunion and even though it was one of the toughest academic experiences I had, I’m glad it didn’t permanently extinguish my desire to learn.

As a teacher, I hope I won’t make the same mistake of labeling students one way or another because living up to that standard or breaking free from it is harder than it seems.  Labels are the lazy shortcuts that rob us from getting to know the complexities of each student.  Being smart is also not a binary concept, and I can now recognize that there are some areas I excel at and others where I don’t.  In Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences, there are several domains where students can excel.  I was excited to recognize in myself a strength in one of these dimensions: Visual / Spatial.  I’m often the one in my family that navigates through complicated subway maps and one of my favorite classes in college was 3D architectural modeling.  And somehow, I can always find my way in Las Vegas, where casinos are designed to trap you inside and purposefully have no windows to indicate what time it is.  However, if I try to learn a sequence of dance steps like in a Bollywood dancing class, I have a really hard time staying in sync with the rest of the dancers (i.e. kinesthetic intelligence).

Bringing this into the classroom, as a substitute teacher, I wrestle with some of the “clip” systems I see.  In this classroom management technique, every student starts the day with a clip at a “happy” level, but with certain behaviors during the day, students can find themselves either being clipped up or down.  I imagine that over the course of the year, students with behavior issues might find themselves getting clipped down numerous times so by extension, the classroom might start to label that student as a “problem” kid.  As a substitute teacher, students will often ask me to clip another classmate up or down, but I usually leave the clips alone.  I hope that when I do become a full time teacher, I will have the opportunity to get to know my students on a deeper level, so that when distracting behaviors arise, I can address the issues directly.  For example, a close friend of mine has been going through a difficult divorce, and her son was having some trouble in school.  If his teacher hadn’t checked in, my friend’s son could have been labeled as a problem kid, but fortunately through building a stronger student/teacher relationship, her son is performing better now.

So, labels are not only problematic for the students who are struggling in school, but also the ones at the top of the class.  Every student should have the freedom to shed their labels and try on different identities because we all have different gifts to share.