From a first-year student's email after she realized her draft would need serious, major revision in the next two days to earn a passing grade on the final:"I feel really stressed out and overwhelmed because every time I think I do a good job on something it turns out my work is average."
What is it about this that is making me crack up a little? Maybe the sound of shattered snowflake dreams crashing to the ground pushes on my funny bone, I don't know.
Is it snowflakery is there's no sense of entitlement?
ReplyDeleteLaughing at that sentence alone seems kind of cruel, and the student does seem to be starting the process that leads to non-snowflakery, assuming he or she is a snowflake right now, which isn't evident.
@HPP: Yes, I found this sentence both sad and funny, and I felt a little bad smiling at it. There's a touch of flakiness/entitlement in the fact that she's upset about being average two days before a deadline -- why isn't her naturally occurring and vaguely conceived "good job" going to get her an A? (Hint: Because she didn't read the MFing assignment sheet.) Otherwise, yeah, I think this is overall a positive, constructive phase for this student to be in.
Deleteevery time I think I do a good job on something it turns out my work is average.
ReplyDeleteWelcome to reality, average person. By definition, most people are at or near average, and so is their work. Not everyone can be special, or the word has no meaning.
It's a hard thing for people to come to that realization. I watched a friend of mine really go through a rough time of it when she realized that she would never, ever be a writer, because, well, she wasn't very good at it and never would be, despite having read and studied every writing book in existence. That said, it's gratifying to see someone realizing it. Painful or not, they need to get over themselves and the fantasy lives they've been conjuring so they can get on with enjoying their REAL lives.
DeleteThere really is a learning curve for many students. I try to help them understand my expectations of good, average, excellent, etc., but most of them come in completely, blithely ignorant about the value of their work. It's okay, I tell them, when they blurt something like Lucy's student. I'm here to help you understand JUST that.
ReplyDeleteYou people are cruel. ALL students are in the upper 5 percent; don't you know that? :-)
ReplyDeleteEvery once in a while they give us a look inside their heads. It's scary in there (and, yes, funny, and more than a little sad. After all, if we lived in a world where "average" work was also genuinely a "good job," we'd all be in pretty good shape, wouldn't we? There's a lot of confusion in that statement between relative and absolute measures of quality. Perhaps yet another thing for which we can blame youth sports?)
ReplyDeleteThis student is a product of the self-esteem bullshit of the last twenty-plus years possibly with a dash of the machinegunnable, laborcampable No Child Left Behind pferdsheisse, so "good" is average and "excellent" is decent....Eric Blair must be laughing in hell.
DeleteIt's nice to hear their view about themselves, their work and what they think are reasonable expectations on our part. As others have said, "Yes, your work is good. Most everybody's work is good. That means you're average. Do better than good."
ReplyDeleteAs per Lake Wobegon... "where everyone is above average".
Deletetake it to the limit: two people in a competition. one is above average, the other below. It is merely a consequence of the attrition. The longer we are in the game, the more average we become. Its somewhat reminiscent of the Peter principle where we rise to our highest level of incompetence.
ReplyDeleteI graduated near the top of my class at a public high school and went off to a quasi-Ivy where I was dismayed to find I was average. I got over it.
ReplyDeleteThere's nothing new or particularly snowflaky about this. What would be snowflaky would be if they blamed YOU for it.
The same thing happened to me. I graduated from high school with a 90+% average and couldn't figure out why my university grades weren't higher than they were. Eventually I got used to it, though I finished barely in the upper third of my undergrad class.
DeleteIt didn't do me any lasting damage, though, as I went on to earn to master's degrees and a Ph. D. One reason, I think, was that I grew up in the years following my B. Sc. I learned that a high GPA wasn't the sole requirement for academic success, though a concerted effort certainly is.
I hate 'character development.' Even though it's always been good for me.
ReplyDeleteI think we're just privy to too much of their "venting" thanks to the immediacy of e-mail.
ReplyDeleteI remember being plenty worried and frustrated as an undergrad, despite being a capable and pretty responsible student. Thank Dog we didn't have e-mail back then, because I probably would have been stupid and immature enough to fire off a petulant message like the one Lucy received.
I'm sure glad I was able to struggle toward academic maturity privately, without bothering any of my poor professors with my childish sturm und drang.
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DeleteHave you ever encountered the "comment on comments" phenomenon? I've met with students to discuss past essays and found that they added comments to my written comments, usually venty in nature. One went on a page-long written tirade because I had inadvertently mis-spelled his unusually-spelled name. Another responded to my gentle encouragement ("You have good ideas; let's give them the expression they deserve.") in all CAPS: "THIS IS HOW I THINK! WHY DOES THIS WOMAN WANT TO CHANGE ME?!"
DeleteI come from two cultures where collectivism is the norm. We didn't struggle with being average. We WANTED to be average. I hated being singled out in college for anything that was better than average. I had to get over that, too. I'm not saying I was above average a lot, but any indication of being 'better' than average was cause for embarrassment on my part. So it seems it all just boils down to what the prevailing preferable ideology is of one's culture.
ReplyDeleteIn the US we live in a culture where "I'm special," has been reiterated so much that they are actually surprised to be average??? How is it that they don't realize it until college? Why is it the jobs of college professors to let them know that they're NOT special? Are college professors the last line of defense against the lies of everyone prior to this? And if so, why?!!!
I don't think there's anything wrong with being special. Indeed, it's probably a major motivator for most of us academics. What's wrong is a sense of specialness based on nothing, as has been so thoroughly pushed on young Americans in recent decades. It's not really the job of college professors to let our students know they aren't special: it's just that everyone else is so full of their empty sense of specialness, no one else will do it, aside from the employers our students face after us.
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