The Danger of Generalizing

A post by a recent reader led me to revisit my conclusions about one of my ESL students. I realized that it is always dangerous to generalize, or in other words, to assume that a person or situation is going to be such a thing based on past observations or experiences with similar people or situations. No person is the same: their motivations, their life experiences, their personalities, their family life...all these things contribute to who they are and why they do what they do.

As teachers, we often catch ourselves grouping our students into one group or another. Now, true, these students often become "self-fulfilling prophecies", in that, because of our experience, we were able to predict how their school year would turn out. But fairly often, that isn't the case, and these students turn out to be or do something else. Often it's because of someone influential in their life who takes an interest in them and devotes their time to helping them do well or to change their choices.

These are the people we should strive to be. These are the differences we should seek to be in the lives of others.

How have you seen the effect of generalizing (or of not generalizing) in the lives of the children that you influence?