No sir, you don't understand, I'm really dumb!

Hector and I were working with a neat teenage group, self named Youth Education Tekies. These mostly high-schoolers, living in some of the poorest colonias (unicorporated communities) of the lower Rio Grande Valley of south Texas, had taken upon themselves the task of setting up and maintaining a computer lab in a community center that is not much more than a wood-frame house typical of those in the neighborhood.
Evenings, adults and older relatives would congregate to learn how to use the computers. Many of the adults were minimally literate in Spanish and with no keyboarding skills. M. a highschool junior 'tekie' was a wonderful tutor and mentor with the adults. M. was skilled and proficient in using the computer, surfing the net, and finding appropriate sites. She was also pacient and sensitive as she coached and guided the adults just barely learning to find the letters on the keyboard. One lady, call her Doña Chencha, was elated because she was able to type her name. M. helped her put it it in a Power Point frame, with a fancy font and in very large type. Both Hector and I lauded M. She kept ignoring our very specific praises. "You are such a good teacher." "You are so proficient on the computer" "You are very pacient and don't mind repeating instructions to the ladies you are guiding".
She would keep contradicting us and claiming lack of intelligence. She reminded us that she was repeating Junior year and flunking was a pattern that went back many years.
"But we see you as brilliant" and we would proceed to enumerate all the specific instances, seen by us and others, of her intelligence.
She finally confronted both of us.

No sir, you don't understand. I'm really dumb. You say those things because you like me, but I am very bad in school. I'm probably not going to finish high school.

To me, these were obviously old recordings. Someone, someones, had consistently and persistently told her she couldn't learn. Who had taken so much time and effort to say these things with such persistence? Could it have been teachers? Loved ones?
Who can say that words didn't hurt M.?

Worse than sticks & stones

Wrongs unredressed, or insults unavenged -- Wordsworth

Prejudice squints when it looks, and lies when it talks. -- Unknown

While visiting an elementary school in East LA and standing in the hallway with the principal, two young boys were walking towards us from opposite directions. They had large wood paddles with restroom keys and as they came up to each other it was obvious they knew each other but had not seen each other recently. One boy asks the other, "Are you LEP like me?" "No" responded the other."I'm At Risk!"
These pre-teens had self-defined -- being of limited-English-proficiency and in danger of not completing school.

Our educational labels are stigmatizing -- and of little positive benefit to students. No matter how we adults sort out and classify students, the label becomes a prophesy fulfilled, a prediction school really pays attention to and, for the deficit branded student, an academic futility tattoo.
The challenge is not only to replace the words, but to shift the attitudes. We've shifted 'drop out prevention' to 'school holding power' so that the locus of change is the school. But when the phrase is used and not understood by the school person we have to say 'dropout prevention'.

The public conversation is complicated by the overt political use of language for political propaganda. "Tax Relief" is used to combat and re-focus the public interest in funding schools and encouragement of a general will to contribute proportionately to have excellent public schools. We, my side, speak of 'full funding' for public schools. We appeal to the social contract we have made with all of our children to have access to an excellent education. Our phrases include 'Graduation Guaranteed' and 'Graduation for All'. The words are a means of having a conversation about the possibilities.
But the challenge remains to convert individuals from the feeling that they are beleaguered taxpayers being bled for no-good-reason to a different notion: that of responsible adults providing for the children and for our economic future.

My opening salvo was about words that hurt and harm. The closing is about words that encourage narrow-minded selfishness. In either case, to loosely quote Sancho Panza, it doesn't matter if the pitcher hits the stone or the stone hits the pitcher, it still will be bad for the pitcher. Educational labels and phrases can hurt our children much worse than rocks and clubs.