Audience: Educator

BEYOND A WAITRESS

Five months ago, I started working nights at a restaurant. Though the restaurant is cozy and well-attended, I noticed something peculiar: many diners were not communicating with each other. They were distracted by their screens. Disturbed, I wrote an op-ed and published it in The Seattle Times. At the end of the article, I included this short bio: “Shoshana Wineburg graduated from Stanford University in 2009 with a degree in American Studies. She waits tables in Seattle.” Comments ensued. Most people responded to the article’s content; others could care less. They wanted to talk about my degree. One user wrote that my bio was “the saddest part of the article.” Someone else said my degree was not “worthwhile,” and that waiting tables after graduating from Stanford was “kinda depressing.” I haven’t just waited tables after Stanford. I’ve done other things. But that’s beside the point. The point is that …

Second-Hand Performance Anxiety: 5 Reasons Why Parents Fret Over Their Kids’ Performance

Welcome to the season of parental anxiety. As surely as winter melts into spring and Uncle Sam demands his yearly tribute, we start worrying about end of semester tests, registration deadlines for the “right” summer camps and the arrival of college acceptance (or, heaven forbid, rejection) letters. That parents fret about their kids’ performance is no secret. Why and what to do about it is less clear. In this blog I’m going to explore some of the reasons behind the handwringing. Yes, we all love our kids and we all want them to be successful. But that has always been true of parents, and yesterday’s parents didn’t obsess over every test grade and spend every spare minute shuttling them to rehearsals, matches and tournaments…did they? No. They did not. (Ask yourself: did your parents parent the way you do? Did your friends’ parents?) You probably know my position on overparenting. However well-intentioned, it doesn’t do kid …

Why Cheat? More Importantly, Why Not?

Reports of academic dishonesty – within prestigious universities, on high school exit exams, by authors of bestselling books – have been widespread this fall. In the wake of cheating, academic communities rush to bolster or clarify disciplinary procedures. New or repeated sessions about proper citation techniques are added to the curriculum. Teachers ask students to leave backpacks at the door and phones on the front desk. Then we all pause and ask, “Why?” The answers may vary slightly each time, but they usually include some variation of the following: “I just didn’t have time to really ‘do’ the work.” “Because I could – it is so easy.” “I don’t care about the material – it’s totally irrelevant to my life.” “The teacher doesn’t even care or check.” And most often: “Because I can’t mess up.” In our current high stakes system where every test or assignment seems to be a critical step on the pathway to adult …

From Strategy to Authenticity: Writing Your Perfect Essay

Here’s one way to think about the college admissions essay. The task of the essay is to sway admissions officers. Writing a good essay is like marketing a product. It requires that you appeal to the preferences of admissions officers (whatever those are) and that you present a crafted and manicured version of your self – one that gives you the best chance of getting in. I call this the strategic approach. This admissions essay writing philosophy is based on two core premises: It is relatively easy to get inside the heads of admissions officers and figure out what they want to hear. By telling admissions officers what they want to hear, you increase your chance of getting in. The strategic approach has a seductive quality and is becoming more and more popular among high-achieving students and their parents. In a culture that values prestige and success, this approach offers what appears to be a sure-fire way of getting in to top institutions. The proble …

App Season (No, not those apps, college apps)

The college application season is fully underway and seniors across the country are madly collecting recommendations, gathering information about schools, and crafting essays about the meaning of life. As anyone who has been through an application process knows, it is an intensely personal and humbling whirlwind of an experience. Amidst this mad dash, a process given an almost insane amount of weight – will their location at age nineteen, in fact, be the most important determinant of all future trajectories? really? – they almost certainly have a few other things going on. They probably are attending school, doing homework and classwork, and possibly taking one or more honors or AP classes. They might have extracurricular activities, such as music, sports, art, or spiritual study. I hope they have family responsibilities and are, at the very least, responsible for making their bed and washing a few dishes. Given that they are adolescent, they are doubtless spending a sig …

Why Homework? And How?

As ‘Back To School’ evenings are being held across the country, I know that homework has resurfaced as one of the most hotly debated topics among all constituencies – students, parents, teachers, and administrators. In my opinion, here are the three essential questions to ask of every piece of homework: What is the point? What is the timeline? How will it be assessed? What is the point? Is this a skill-building exercise such as writing practice or balancing chemical equations? If it is, and has been designed to help a student build what Teresa Amabile calls ‘domain skills’ so that the learner can move toward richer, more complex, and creative work, how can it be effective for all learners? Each student does not need the same, standardized amount of practice to master every skill. Is the work needed to prepare for the next class? I have wrestled with this question for years. For a long time, I believed that i …

Encouraging Failure to Promote Success

I often ask my graduate students, all of whom plan to be teachers, an unnerving question: how will they set up their classrooms so that failure is rewarded? The question forces us to confront our fears, and assumptions, about failure: “Wouldn’t that just encourage laziness or lack of effort?” the grad students ask. “Give students permission to give up?” A similar fear often governs our parenting. A friend confides that she’s worried: if her daughter doesn’t do well in school, she’ll lose confidence, and decide she’s just not that academic. Not only do we worry that failure will mar our children’s chances at future success. We also worry that it will mar their very identities, hurt their self-esteem, and create a self-fulfilling prophesy, an acceptance of failure. But if an identity built on failure is a problem, much research suggests that its opposite – an identity built on …

Failure, Adversity, Perseverance, SUCCESS

A pack of ninth graders rush into my classroom and insist that I come to the girls’ bathroom as quickly as possible. One of their friends is sobbing and refusing to come out. Apparently, she has earned an A- on a quiz, her lowest grade ever. This bright and capable student is paralyzed by the idea of perceived “failure.” Resilience and grit have been buzz words in both educational postings and the popular media recently. Resilience is the ability to recover from a challenging situation or set-back rather than being crushed by it. Grit is defined as: perseverance and passion for long-term goals. Grit entails working strenuously toward challenges, maintaining effort and interest over years despite failure, adversity, and plateaus in progress. [Duckworth, Peterson, Matthews, and Kelly; Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2007, Vol. 92, No. 6, 1087–1101] Explicitly embedded in the definition of resilience and grit is failure. In fact, the only …