I have seen this trend in my own classes; students with names near the end of the alphabet generally do worse. This reminds me of the classic correlation vs causation problem (my comments at the bottom). So here are my attempts at explaining this phenomenon:
1) Business owners with last names near the end of the alphabet are more likely to be in the back of the yellow pages (or at the end of a bookshelf), more likely to be less successful, and more likely to have less money to spend on their kids education.
2) Whether it's lining up for lunch in elementary school or handing out papers in high school, people with last names near the end of the alphabet may have a more contentious relationship with the educational system.
3) When put in alphabetical order, they may be more likely to be in the back of the class, which has a negative effect on learning.
4) Being at the end of the alphabet puts you later in class registry for college, which could decrease grades, which could decrease income, which could decrease the money spend on children's education.
5) Perhaps last names starting with X, Y and Z are harder to pronounce, which I can imagine has a negative impact on career.
I'm grasping at straws, anyone else have a better explanation?
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Interesting thoughts.
ReplyDeleteThis was a topic explored in Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers. His theory is similar to your #4: He says people born in earlier months are relatively older in their classes, and at young ages a few months difference in age is a big difference in maturity. So the slightly older kids get singled out as smarter, etc. and get more attention making them over the long run much more successful than those same people would have been if they were born in December. He specifically does the analysis with hockey players and I think it is pretty convincing, but I do not know that the same logic applies as well with schools because there is not a lot of individual attention in schools -- if there is, it probably goes more toward the slower kids.
I think age and the alphabetical order of your last name are pretty different issues.
ReplyDeleteOnly 1 or 2 of your ideas would apply to your students. I got nothing, this is a weird one for sure.