My senior year of high school I participated in a year long course that studied developmental psychology paralleled with teaching strategies and ideology. With that being the context, I was allowed to take a free period and work with students that went to the same high school as myself, St. Paul Central, but had math, reading and or writing capabilities equal to that of an average seventh grade student. Objectively, the students were all minorities. Each student had been diagnosed with some specific learning disability and this was evident and publicized among the students throughout the classroom. It was unsettling to set myself into an environment such as that with such obvious differences separating me from these students, my peers: race, gender, speech patterns, shoes, friend circles, academic abilities, class schedules, and most subtle yet important obvious authority I achieved as an outsider there to give 'help'.

This experience for me was extremely beneficial in terms of my own learning to apply what I was learning in my own coursework and literally explore different learning habits of those different than myself inside of a classroom. The way students my own age could understand or not understand a concept such as basic sentence structure and the how's and why's that went along with that ability were very curious. But this got me thinking about genetics combined with environment. Whether a student I was working with could or could not identify where a period should go in two sentences might have to do with genetics. Perhaps their parents did not graduate high school and didn’t care about their schooling. Maybe their grandparents were immigrants and illiterate in English, therefore less fortunate economically as well as academically. In comparison both of my parents attended college and were able to support me in a nourishing and academically stimulating environment. However, genetics aside, we all ended up at the same place.

Yes, Steven Pinker makes a great argument for genetics. There is no doubt that those we share a similar genetic make up with we will also share similar qualities with—mannerisms all the way to inherent intelligence. However, to tie in my point above, this classroom I worked in, it was in the windowless basement of my five-story high school. These students were not given the same free periods, such as myself, to spend learning about college and future academic options. The students who have similar situational backgrounds as those I worked with, but who may live in Chicago, will have a classroom three times as large as the one I was working in with out the amount of communicational help and therefore lack of variety in ways of reaching those who learn differently. Placing someone in the basement where those who are ‘succeeding’ in school are on the top floor sends a very obvious message and create an irrevocable barrier between the two.

Whatever their genetic disposition, any person can learn to write a sentence, can learn to do algebra, can make it to medical school. But the person that cannot do these things are those who are never exposed, who are in an environment that lacks opportunity and variety in communication. A special educational, as I saw, will slowly learn to not speak with the student in IB classes and it is this environmental impact that affects the growing world today. So genetics aside, I see endless ways how environment and communication habits have a huge impact from day one and forward.