Success in school is not a moral issue

Theater.

The “real world” rhetoric among teachers is relentless.

It’s not all teachers — in fact, there’s an increasing number of teachers who have a more nuanced view. But the prevailing story goes like this:

“If I don’t take points off for late work/give zeros for missing homework/point out every error, how will my student make it in the real world, where bosses aren’t forgiving and deadlines are strict? I have to teach them to follow through on their responsibilities.”

I will only buy the notion of “the real world” if what we’re saying is that school, with its grades, tests, rankings, and curriculum-by-committee, is an artificial world.

And if school is an artificial world, our success or failure there should have no bearing on our success or failure in life — in the real world.

And in fact, it really doesn’t.

It doesn’t!

Associating schoolwork with our work output as an adult, teachers with “bosses,” and grades with — what, salary? Performance reviews? — is not the perfect fit that so many people seem to think it is.

For one thing, kids have no choice about whether to go to school. It’s a lot more like prison than “the real world.”

When you have a choice about your life, you may decide to work in an environment where you aren’t trying to please a taskmaster boss, where you don’t have several hours of work to do each evening to prove your dedication, and you aren’t working on tight, do-or-die deadlines.

The possibilities are infinite. You might busk in public spaces while you travel the world. You might put all of your time and energy into raising children and running a household. You might seek grants for groundbreaking research. For those of us lucky enough to choose our lifestyle (which is most of the people reading this, now that serfdom and slavery have fallen out of favor), we will figure out what we need to do to make it work.

The idea that I, as a teacher, have a moral responsibility to prepare students for the hypothetical consequences of missing a hypothetical work deadline at their hypothetical future job by giving them a zero or “ten points off” for missing a deadline on a five-paragraph essay about the Egyptians — at age twelve — is absurd.

It doesn’t fix the problem, anyway. The same lack of executive functioning that leads a twelve-year-old to have difficulty imagining Thursday the 19th (when the missing paper was due) on Thursday the 12th (when the missing paper was assigned) also makes it impossible for her to imagine how her current habits and actions will influence her far-off future as an adult. As far as she’s concerned, she’s going to be a kid forever.

If we want to fix a problem like consistent missed deadlines or missed assignments, we have to be clear on the problem we’re solving. If the teacher believes that poor school performance results from lack of character or work ethic, she will try to fix it within that framework, using shame, punishment, coercion, lectures, and a posture of disappointment to guide the student back to good behavior.

On the other hand, if the teacher considers that poor school performance might arise out of difficulty with the subject matter, difficulty with managing work, or other challenges the student is facing, the whole dynamic changes. Instead of making it a moral issue, the teacher can work to discern what the underlying causes are and address them.

Whatever the student’s experience is, if the teacher rejects the idea that she is supposed to prepare this student for “the real world,” she might just have a chance to connect with the student as a human being. She can be kind, welcoming, and warm, regardless of what’s been turned in on time. She can laugh at the student’s jokes and include the student in discussions, regardless of the student’s last test grade. Such a teacher understands that her influence only extends so far and that students, like all of us, are on their own paths in life.

Ironically, once the teacher lets go of feeling the need to communicate disapproval of a student’s habits and choices, she might find that the student will step up. When we feel valued, we feel good; when we feel good, we tend to do things that will help us continue to feel good. Sometimes that means working hard to please a teacher (our ourselves).

Poor grades are just one way of measuring a human being, and not a very good way. The ability to adhere to a deadline is just one skill among many. Obedience is useful, but not as useful as ingenuity. Those of us who are educators and mentors would do well to keep our standards in perspective and remember that we are only dealing with one tiny silver of someone’s experience. It’s not up to us to decide what “the real world” will look like for our students. It’s up to them. What can we do to help them to embrace that?