Bumblebees

The bumblebee is very social and forms colonies of fifty or so with other bumblebees.  Bumblebees generally avoid humans, so it you have been stung, it probably wasn’t a bumblebee.  Bumblebees feed on nectar using their long hairy tongues to lap up the liquid from flowers.  They are vitally important to agriculture as they are chief pollinators for many crops.  Currently, the number of bumblebees has declined sharply in our country; mostly from the use of pesticides and loss of land – you know, when they build a new subdivision on a farm field. Bumblebees fly.  Duh.  The point about bumblebees flying is that they shouldn’t be flying at all.  They are not built for flying.  Aerodynamically, a bumblebee shouldn’t be able to fly, but the bumblebee doesn’t know that so it goes on flying anyway.

In schools, the “bumblebee” students are the ones that are referred to as “over achievers”.  I have never been fond of this term because it implies that these students  were never good enough to succeed, so that any success must be a fluke. But I digress.  Here’s my point – we should never tell kids what we perceive that they can’t do.  “Can’t” is a word to remove from your vocabulary.  We need to focus on what kids can do and remind them of this.  Confidence has to come before competence. It will be cyclical in this regard.  As kids become more confident in their abilities, the competence will show up.  Don’t dwell on the deficiencies – help them overcome come them by providing tasks that build their confidence first.  Avoid that “test corrections” mindset of having kids “fix” the problems that they failed on.  Here’s some insight – if they didn’t know how to do it the first time, they won’t know how to fix it afterward because they don’t know what they don’t know.  Instead, provide remediation/interventions by direct instruction. It is up to us to scaffold learning with confidence building learning activities that leads to competent output.  If not, you will never get these kids to the essential understandings because they have no understanding of the understandings!  We need to let our “bumblebees” fly, but under our confidence-increasing direction.