An Introduction to the Mythology of Student Success

Students are miraculously consistent in their misconceptions of success. My initial inclination is to attribute it to the natural progression of adolescent becoming. Students feign confidence (sometimes arrogance) and almost (sometimes) convince themselves they aren't utterly bewildered by their shifting social, emotional, physical, intellectual and spiritual experiences.  In short, having become comfortable in childhood, they begin the discomfort of existential becoming.

   I consistently see the same two student misconceptions that impact their education and adversely affect their becoming.  To clarify, I'm not addressing the very real and common impact of trauma, diverse learning styles or intellectual elasticity. Instead, we'll examine generalities in order to illuminate two troublesome underpinnings of the school experience.

    First, many students believe and operate from the belief that the most important part of learning is to not be wrong. 

    Second, many students have little understanding of or faith in their own creative power. I'll develop that idea in a future post. For now, let's consider the predisposition to not being wrong.

    Somewhere between learning to stand in line and the quadratic equation, students develop a fetish for
getting the "right" answer.  It might be more accurate to say that they try to not be caught being wrong. Almost all incentives in school value the answer, not the work. And not just the answer, but the "right" answer. And not just the "right" answer, but the teacher's version of the "right" answer. Students and teachers come by this inculcation innocuously, almost accidentally, and without ill intent. Younger students want to please their teacher. Older students want high marks. 

    Obviously, getting correct answers is paramount in some instances. But the importance isn't universally translatable. Underneath the immediate reactions of certainty that 2 + 2 = 4 is the realization that the sum of adding two foreign policy allies to two previous  allies depends very much on the nature, capabilities and assets of those two allies. The affects on a student's predisposition of consistently demanding a "right" answer can be unfortunate at best, debilitating at worst. 

    The first way this fetish for right answers undermines students is that it separates the world into "right" and "wrong", a misleading and inaccurate binary, if useful.  While developmentally appropriate, this binary can become dangerous if not revised with complexity.  I want my heart surgeon to perform open heart surgery "correctly", but I also want heart researchers to find "more correct" ways of performing the surgery.  In other words, one understanding holds until superseded by another.  That is the way. An example of this encumbrance in my English classroom is teaching students to break the five paragraph essay mold. The five paragraph essay is not about writing, its about organizing, which is a part of writing. But when we teach students to write, there is no right or wrong. There is only writing.

    A second consequence of students trying to get the right answer is to prioritize where they finish. As such, they want to "be done." We've all heard or read plenty of aphorisms (cliches) like, "its about the journey, not the destination" or "not all who wander are lost." These remind us of the importance of the process, which is so important in any skill. Again, this is not to say where you finish is unimportant, but in school, high school in particular, we undervalue the importance of process. We are never "done." 

    Perhaps the most insidious consequence of prioritizing the finish is to measure and sort students by how closely they can mimic our arbitrary definition of "right". Think about the impact this can have on creativity and originality. Those students who don't follow the teachers' version of correctness often represent new thinking about older ideas, thinking that can create new pathways of understanding. 

    Finally, students good at mimicking their teachers' versions of "right" produces students who think they are "good at" or "talented in" particular areas. Again, this is a pretty innocuous and not altogether unhelpful description, but it limits students' self imaging. In other words, by suggesting they are naturally good at something, we imply that being good at or (maybe?) wanting to be good at something else is unnatural. Hemingway once said something about a book being as much about what is not written as what is written.

    Let me address a few concerns about my position: that the work doesn't matter unless you get the right answer and that many teachers grade the work as a part of the overall evaluation. 

    To be sure, there is a difference between understanding well and understanding not so well. There is a difference between being able to perform a skill and not (again, think about the heart surgeon). But the high school experience should prioritize fearless becoming, not fearful wondering. In other words, a system that consistently measures students on how short of perfect they are is a system that doesn't center kids, it centers an arbitrary fantasy.

 

  As far as "grading the work", that phrase is a euphemism for "Now that's a good parrot."  We can do better.

    Once again I don't offer solutions. I'm not sure I think there are solutions in the sense of "fixing" things. We don't and students don't have a totally "wrong" sense of success. We do a lot of things well.  But I think there is some internal orientation that needs to continue to happen in the hearts of people and the hearts of our pedagogy.