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Last Saturday afternoon, I was watching the football game between Florida and Alabama. During commercials, I surfed the rest of the channels. But on this afternoon, I never got back to the football game because of Audrey Hepburn. I always put the remote down if I come upon the beautiful Miss Hepburn, and there she was, opposite Rex Harrison in "My Fair Lady."
The musical is based on "Pygmalion," a play by George Bernard Shaw. Shaw's play was itself based on a Greek myth, about an artist named Pygmalion who fell in love with a statue he had sculpted.
Shaw rewrote that myth of an artist and his statue into a story about a teacher and his student.
Hepburn plays the role of Eliza Doolittle, an uneducated flower girl. Harrison is Professor Henry Higgins, who teaches "proper English" to Eliza so she can fool the class-conscious snobs at a London ball.
Throughout the play, Higgins is the educated, rational character. In the scene that caught my attention, he and Doolittle are arguing after their success at the party. Higgins is so pompously articulate, so arrogantly logical, that Eliza can't keep up and sometimes stammers.
But she is the one who says the most memorable words, which especially resonate for teachers, when she tells Higgins, "The difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how's she's treated."
OAK SCHOOL EXPERIMENT
A few months ago, educators shared in this column their suggestions for new teachers. Many of them said, in various ways, to pay attention to the student, to listen to the student, to respect the student. Much of their counsel is summed up in Eliza's words, which teachers might paraphrase as "students will respond to what's expected of them."
It sounds simplistic — expect the best from students and they'll deliver it. And it is. There are too many influences on children for a teacher's expectations to be the only significant variable.
But teachers — and parents — know that they are the mirrors children see themselves reflected in.
That idea, in fact, was the subject of another literary "Pygmalion" connection, "Pygmalion in the Classroom: Teacher Expectation and Pupils' Intellectual Development" by Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson, written in 1968.
The book describes an experiment in the real but fictitiously named Oak School. Teachers were encouraged to believe that some of their elementary students were especially intelligent and others were not. But there was no real basis for the expectations that the teachers were given.
At the end, the students who were expected to do well did better than those not expected to do as well. The authors concluded that the expectations of the teachers had a major influence on the growth of the students.
SING A NEW SONG
That experiment reminds us of how illogical expectations have shaped our society. We remember when women were intellectually marginalized. They were steered away from science, engineering and math because it was already decided — by men — that they were not capable.
How many good scientists were lost because of an erroneous view of a whole sex?
Of course, in the individual case, there's a limit to how much expectation can influence performance. I've frustrated a number of singing teachers who were positive they could teach me how to carry a tune.
Sometimes, we sang in English. Sometimes in Latin. I tried to meet to their expectations. One was even impressed, for a moment.
"I thought you were singing third harmony," he said. "Then I realized you can't sing at all."
After one liturgy, the priest told me, "About your singing. Work on your jump shot."
But in spite of my musical experience, effective teachers know Eliza is right. How students are treated shapes how they learn.
Jerry McGovern, the Press-Republican's coordinator of Newspapers-in-Education, taught in New York state's public schools, and now teaches in the Communication Department of Plattsburgh State. He can be reached at gmcgovern@pressrepublican.com or 565-4126. This column is the opinion of the writer and not necessarily of this newspaper.
