Teacher Expectations

Something that I have been meaning to write a blog about for a while is teacher expectations. They can have a colossal influence on you and your grades in the long-term; they can cause you to exceed your target grades and be incredibly successful, or they can shatter your dreams and make you feel belittled. Therefore, they really are something that massively contributes to your education and how well you do in the long-run.

Teacher expectations regularly go from one extreme to the other; some teachers will have high expectations, causing you to sort out your attitude so that you work hard, be resilient and achieve your target grades or above. However, they can be the complete opposite – teachers may expect you to fail, they may lower your self-esteem with negative, snide comments and make you feel like children via patronisation. This can cause you to be lazy and underachieve.

Despite this, it could be different; low expectations may make you want to ‘pick up your game’ and work hard. They could make you have a good work ethic and work your butt off in order to see the look on their smug faces when you prove them so very wrong.

Although, high expectations aren’t always positive either – if expectations are too high, it can make you very stressed; causing you to give up on work because you believe that you aren’t good enough – therefore, this can cause you to have a low self-esteem and a high level of self-doubt.

It is important for teachers to be supportive of us; they should care about us and stop worrying about their ‘precious’ reputations – this is our one and only shot at education, so they shouldn’t be ruining it for us. Although, teachers really can make a huge difference to us – they will be the ones that we remember when we look back at our time at school. Whether they are the ones that we remember as being really kind and supportive or the ones that we remember from putting us down – the ones that we want to prove wrong... they really do make a huge difference!

Teachers don’t always realise how much of an influence they have on our education – they see us day-in-day-out; they are there when we are happy and laughing with our friends. They are also there when we are stressed and upset, at our lowest points – they contribute to our education more than anyone quite realises. Their support can be the difference between success and failure; it’s about time we realised it...