Ah, reminds me of the same thing being done in a more serious context. It's been years, but let's see if I recall. "Head of the Class", a sitcom from the 1980's taking place mostly in the gifted class (speaking of things that wouldn't fly today...) at a school. One episode featured one of the semi-regular cast from the school's remedial class. The idea as I remember it was that she wasn't dumb or anything, she'd just kind of fallen through the cracks and, after the world decided she was dumb, she became complacent and accepting of the lower standards everyone expected of her. (The line I remember most was "You have to write your essays? If I copy the right page of the encyclopedia I get an A.")
The main characters take her under their wing and teach her some of the stuff they're learning. Then she goes back to her class and the teacher asks her what the Revolutionary War was about. She starts in with what she'd learned from the gifted students, about the lack of colonial representation in Parliament etc., when the teacher stops her and says the answer is "A tax on tea." He then has the entire class chant, almost cultlike, "A TAX ON TEA. A TAX ON TEA." with the clear expectation that it's all they'll be able to absorb. And that's where she starts to see the damage caused by lower standards. As I recall it ended with her managing to get out of the mire with continued tutoring.
That really stuck with me - hell, it's one of only two things from that entire show I remember - because I grew up in a very small town where everyone knew everyone and I saw kids fall through the cracks mostly because of their family name and having an older sibling or a parent who had a reputation for being dumb. They were given up on after their first failing because failing was all that was expected of them. They weren't corrected and picked back up like a normal kid, they were just... abandoned. And it started a corrosive pattern some of them never got out of.
And here I am almost 40 years later still fighting against what's now called the soft bigotry of low expectations.
Ah, reminds me of the same thing being done in a more serious context. It's been years, but let's see if I recall. "Head of the Class", a sitcom from the 1980's taking place mostly in the gifted class (speaking of things that wouldn't fly today...) at a school. One episode featured one of the semi-regular cast from the school's remedial class. The idea as I remember it was that she wasn't dumb or anything, she'd just kind of fallen through the cracks and, after the world decided she was dumb, she became complacent and accepting of the lower standards everyone expected of her. (The line I remember most was "You have to write your essays? If I copy the right page of the encyclopedia I get an A.")
The main characters take her under their wing and teach her some of the stuff they're learning. Then she goes back to her class and the teacher asks her what the Revolutionary War was about. She starts in with what she'd learned from the gifted students, about the lack of colonial representation in Parliament etc., when the teacher stops her and says the answer is "A tax on tea." He then has the entire class chant, almost cultlike, "A TAX ON TEA. A TAX ON TEA." with the clear expectation that it's all they'll be able to absorb. And that's where she starts to see the damage caused by lower standards. As I recall it ended with her managing to get out of the mire with continued tutoring.
That really stuck with me - hell, it's one of only two things from that entire show I remember - because I grew up in a very small town where everyone knew everyone and I saw kids fall through the cracks mostly because of their family name and having an older sibling or a parent who had a reputation for being dumb. They were given up on after their first failing because failing was all that was expected of them. They weren't corrected and picked back up like a normal kid, they were just... abandoned. And it started a corrosive pattern some of them never got out of.
And here I am almost 40 years later still fighting against what's now called the soft bigotry of low expectations.
It's like the miracle of teaching a dog/cat to use labeled AAC buttons.
Challenge a mind and be rewarded.
Also, Head of the Class was an awesome show, and was meant as a sort of flip side of the coin to Welcome Back, Kotter.