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Butterfly Theory - Freddie deBoer

freddiedeboer.substack.com · 973 words · saved by 1 readers

I’d love to take credit for this analogy, but I picked it up somewhere along my teaching journey, from one mentor or another. I haven’t taught since I was still at Brooklyn College. I miss it very much. You may have noticed a particular type of kid at school, at some point from kindergarten to college. It’s a fairly rare breed but one that crops up from time to time in pretty much any educational context. These kids are ones who are not just weird but intentionally weird. They act in a characteristically “zany” way, deliberately cultivating a reputation as the crazy kid who will do anything. They’re typically tolerated by most of their peers, bullied by a few, and in a sad parasitic relationship with others - the “normal” kid who will pay the weird kid a dollar to eat food off the floor, the kids who cheer him on when he acts provocatively antisocial, the ones who prompt him to get into trouble at school. This kind of behavior is best defined as that which cultivates a deliberate reputation as the weird kid, at social and academic cost, in exchange for which the weird kid gets nothing but that reputation - and a defined identity in the social order. It can be hard to understand, but this type of student can be effectively described and understood according to butterfly theory.

I’d love to take credit for this analogy, but I picked it up somewhere along my teaching journey, from one mentor or another. I haven’t taught since I was still at Brooklyn College. I miss it very much. You may have noticed a particular type of kid at school, at some point from kindergarten to college. It’s a fairly rare breed but one that crops up from time to time in pretty much any educational context. These kids are ones who are not just weird but intentionally weird. They act in a characteristically “zany” way, deliberately cultivating a reputation as the crazy kid who will do…

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