We're not all the same

The Week magazine reports that a Rhode Island middle school canceled its traditional Honors Night over fears its "exclusive nature" would hurt some students' feelings. They later restored it when there was an outcry from parents. The principal of the school originally announced that top students would be saluted in inclusive, "team based" ceremonies. But in the face of strong criticism, she reinstituted the separate honors event.

We see this happening all across the country and it seems to me that we're setting a bad precedent because we're NOT all equal. There have been achievers and failures throughout recorded history and that's not going to change. And unless someone has a physical injury that prevents them from competing on equal footing with the others, the only excuse is an unwillingness to do the work.

I see this every day in the classes I teach. I've done this long enough now that I privately assign final grades after the first week of classes and then at the end of the semester, compare the real final grades with the grades I had projected for students and I'm never too far off. Students who sit in the back of the classroom, who wear their headphones into class, who sleep, who don't take notes and don't participate in class discussions are much more likely to perform poorly than those students who don't do any of those things.

I always give a pep talk on the first day of class, attempting in my own feeble way to motivate them to reach inside themselves and do better than they think they can do. But, most of the time, it falls on deaf ears. I wrote a few weeks ago about the student who ran down the hall yelling and jumping for joy because he made a C in Algebra and he was thrilled because it would now transfer to a four year institution.

I was not gifted in math either but I was raised in a culture that said you had to realize how hard you had to work in a particular area to achieve a desired result and then you had to do it. C's were not acceptable in my family. If I had to work twice as hard to get a B or above in Algebra than I did in Social Science, then that's just what I had to do. And if I didn't, no one worried about my hurt feelings because they knew I didn't do what I had to do to succeed.

When we fail to recognize success, we're rewarding mediocrity and for a nation that's trying to reclaim a superior position in education, we can't afford to do that. My generation was taught reading, writing, and arithmetic. Today's student is exposed to a new teaching strategy practically every year that someone has thought up to pad their bottom line.

There are no short cuts to learning. One of the complaints I most often hear from students is that they did poorly on an exam even though they studied. When I ask them what they meant by saying they studied, they often tell me that they read the chapters. Somewhere they got the idea that reading is studying and it isn't. I tell them that studying is getting what's written down on paper into their brain and you can't do that by simply reading the chapters. Its work, it requires effort, it requires time and that's too much for many students who were given grades in high school rather than earning them and passed along from grade to grade without the requisite work required to achieve that status.

Let's quit worrying about hurting student's feelings. If that's the only pain they ever feel in this life, they will be truly blessed. And perhaps the pain will motivate them to do better, to work harder and to achieve more than they have in the past. Failure is not fun and it should motivate a person to do better the next time. If it doesn't, recognizing those that DID succeed isn't going to make much difference to the ones who didn't and don't care.

I was the speaker year before last for our college Phi Theta Kappa induction. That is a national honor society for community college students across the nation, one that I also belonged to when I attended a community college. The audience was composed almost entirely of proud parents and friends and I praised them for dedication to task and instilling in their children the value of working hard to achieve a goal. I did the same thing this past Spring when I spoke at the National Honor Society induction ceremonies at Curtis High School. As the honorees received their recognition one by one, I was watching the parents instead of the students and I could always locate them because they were beaming from ear to ear and clapping louder than anyone else was. They were so proud of their child and the child was proud because of it.

Surely that's what we ought to be concerned with instead of worrying about someone's feelings being hurt. Get off the deck, shake it off and do better next time is a mantra that should be followed in everybody's home, regardless of the task.

Instead of feeling sorry for the child, motivate the child to do better. That's a parent, teacher, and administrator's job and responsibility!