Aristotle and the Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

Have you heard the phrase, “Believe it and you can acheive it?” There are endless phrases and mottos to motivate yourself to suceed. This stemmed from Aristotle, who observed and believed that not only can we effect the sucess or failure of our own lives with our positive or negative thoughts, we can also change the lives and trajectory of those around us. As an educator and mother this is monumental information and I have seen it in action throughout the years. Years ago on the first day of school in my combined second and third grade classroom, we were discussing things we wanted to do that year and books we enjoyed. Suddenly a little boy next to me burst into tears. I was shocked as to what might have caused this. When asked, he adamantly responded that he couldn’t read (entering second grade). His friends could read big books, but he could not. Now he was in with second and third graders and he felt everyone could read-except him. This boy was coming in with his own self-fufilling prophecy. That he couldn’t read meant to him that he wouldn’t read ever. I immediately replied and started my own self fulfilling prophecy for him and all the other kids still listening. “You can’t read YET. There are lots of things we all can’t do YET, and we will learn them together.” I added one three letter word to his belief. The other thing that I did for this child and others that have come later feeling like they (can’t) read, is immediately show them they can read. That same boy just a few days later, who was better but still very hesitant to approach any reading, sat with me with the simplest book that I could find. He read slowly, sounding out each letter as needed, “This is Pat. Pat is a cat.” When he got though two sentences, I shouted, “You read that! You are a reader!” His joy still brings tears to my eyes (literally crying now). Then when I saw his pleasure I inlcuded the class, “Everybody! XXXXX found out he is a reader!” We clapped and said hooray and that kid never looked back. For sure he struggled, this isn’t a miracle story where he picked up a random book and suddenly it just clicked. What happened like magic was changing that kids trajectory. He went from thinking he would always be slow and bad at reading, to thinking that reading was possible and enjoyable. We worked hard that year, and the next in 3rd grade. He is now a honor student in 8th grade.