full on frustration-crying reading a 1938 article warning about the tendency to blame children when they're arbitrarily considered to be "too slow" in learning something -as well as to then categorize them as fundamentally different than other children. and we keep doing the same things. i can't find anything else published by this author but it's wild they had to be the one to point out "if a child is struggling to learn something maybe there's something going on" over the teachers who interact with the kids every day. rare researcher w, in any case.
"When we consider individually the children backward at arithmetic, we find a similar state of affairs. In the senior schools children are found who cannot do ordinary sums because they do not know the tables. At great trouble they are again taught the tables, and in six months they have forgotten them again. To the average teacher there is only one explanation- ‘These children are half M.D.’, and it is very consoling when someone arrives with mental tests and confirms the conclusion. We have examined many of these children and found the explanation to be much simpler. Most of them have had no experience in counting concrete things." - J. Hill (1938) A Criticism of Mental Testing