Children should now be termed "successful" not "clever", writes Katherine Demopoulos. At least, that was the proposal in a motion carried by delegates at this year's conference of the Professional Association of Teachers.
The proposal is a variation on a similar motion at last year's conference - which was thrown out - that students should not be deemed to have failed, but rather to have "delayed success".
Wesley Paxton, the retired business studies lecturer who proposed the latest motion, says we should be helping students to recognise individual success and the persistence that is needed to attain it, rather than focusing on a golden standard of "cleverness".
He says the proposal is a fresh take on the time-honoured maxim "If at first you don't succeed, try, try and try again". "We do approve of the concept of trying again," he says.
Paxton spent most of his career in tertiary education, where, he says, he valued a system that allowed students to improve their grasp of a subject and be reassessed if they did not do as well as they needed to the first time.
He thinks the current system of exams, which requires students to retake them all if they fail, is not particularly helpful.
Simon Smith, a design technology teacher at Sweyne Park school, in Rayleigh, Essex, seconded the motion, because. he says, it is no longer "cool to be clever [in class]".
He says students are often mocked when they put up their hand in class and fewer and fewer students are turning up on prize giving day.
"Yes, they'd like to be clever, but they'd like to win the lottery as well," he says.
"If we were to use the word 'successful' rather than 'clever', we could all achieve [success] at our own level and in our own way."
But will the motion result in any change? "How do you turn a supertanker? I'm not holding my breath, but I'm watching this space," Paxton says.
