When My Assumptions Were Wrong
- Angela Langlands
- 11 hours ago
- 4 min read
My son Xavier was hard to miss.
Smart, creative, quirky, and head and shoulders above most of his classmates, literally. In our small international school in Indonesia, he had a tendency to get wrapped up in whatever game was running in his head, which expressed itself in erratic hand gestures and explosion sounds at unpredictable moments. I say this with enormous love and pride, since those games have earned him a college degree in game design and the ability to create and publish video games. I also say it as someone who was one of his co-teachers in Grade 2, which made every playground incident feel twice as loaded.
Xavier and his classmate Theo* had a dynamic. The kind that's hard to explain to someone who hasn't witnessed it. Two boys who brought out the best in each other when answering math questions, but also the most tumultuous, boundary-testing version of each other, the moment they were within ten metres of each other on the playground. When things escalated, Xavier was on his way to the principal's office, and my husband was on his way for a parent meeting.
Again.
I'll be honest about what Margie* and I did, and didn't do.
Margie*, who some of you will remember from a few weeks ago, was Xavier's homeroom teacher. I was Theo's. Between us, we had every reason to want peace. We didn't help the boys work through their tension and competitiveness. Instead, we worked around it. Different groups. Non-randomized partnerships. Purposeful separations at every turn.
When it came time to build class lists for Grade 3, we did what all teachers do, and created well-balanced homerooms, dividing strong mathematicians, reluctant writers, avid readers. And the boys. We made a strong case to the principal. In no uncertain terms, these two needed to be separated. Everyone agreed. The lists were locked away for next year.
Somewhere over the summer, something happened. A file shifted. New enrollments changed the balance. I don't know exactly. What I do know is that when teachers returned from break, and we sat down with the Grade 3 team for student handover, I looked at the class list and felt my stomach drop.
Both boys. Same class.
I threw a bit of a stink. As a teacher and as a mother, I made my feelings very clear. This wasn't going to work. These two sucked all the oxygen out of a room. The history was too long. The pattern too established.
Nothing changed.
Except my sleep. I worried through teacher prep week. I stress-planned for the first week of school. I mentally mapped out every possible scenario involving the principal's office and my husband's schedule.
Then the boys started school.
Day 1. Nothing.
Day 2. Nothing.
Day 3. Nothing.
The pattern continued. The boys were having a successful time. Dare I say a wonderful time together?
Play dates were planned. Birthday parties attended. The story of their Grade 2 year felt almost fictional by October.
And I sat with that for a long time.
Here's what I got wrong, and I share this with genuine humility.
Margie and I had built a belief together. We had the history, the incidents, and the meetings to back it up. And because we had built it together, it felt absolute. Neither of us challenged it. Neither of us asked whether the boys might repair it, grow out of it, or simply move on. We never explored what it might look like to help them work through the tension rather than design their separation.
We were in a vacuum of belief. And vacuums are dangerous places for teaching teams. They are definitely dangerous for students.
When two people agree completely, when there is no other voice, no other perspective, no one asking what if we're wrong, assumptions calcify. They stop being observations and start being facts. We treated the separation as the only possible answer because no one was there to offer us another question.
That is the quiet risk of working in pairs or in isolation. Not that you'll make bad decisions, but that your good intentions will go unchallenged long enough to harden into the wrong ones.
Learning Communities For the Win!
This is where the learning community model changes something fundamental.
When a team includes not just classroom teachers but educational assistants, specialists, paraprofessionals, counselors, instructional coaches, and administrators, people who see children in different contexts, at different moments, through different lenses, the picture becomes fuller. A fixed situation becomes movable. An assumption gets gently interrupted by someone who saw something different on Tuesday afternoon.
Someone who might have said: Should we try something different before we decide? Perhaps they need some coaching? Or counseling? Should we talk to the boys?
We didn't have that voice. And the boys, and honestly all of us, were the poorer for it.
Teaching is not something we should do alone. Not because we aren't capable. But because capability was never the point. The point is that children are more complex than any single person's experience of them. I would argue they are more complex than two people's experience, too. And they change faster than our assumptions do.
Xavier and Theo are college graduates now. I don't know if they're still in touch. But I think about that Grade 3 year often, how wrong I was, how certain I had been, and how quietly the boys proved every single one of our assumptions obsolete.
Children are not fixed.
And neither should our picture of them be.
*names changed to protect anonymity
Note: This post was edited with AI as an assistant to help refine my structure and readability. My voice and words remain intact.