Muddled motivation leaves students doing bare minimum on hamster wheel of perfection
Welcome to the age of perfectionism, an era that celebrates identicality and belittles outcasts. One is encouraged, but not required, to strictly follow the latest trends. Students must strive for good grades without showing exertion, and extracurricular involvement is a necessity for future success.
Mindless scrolling of the realms of falsified realities has bred a generation that requires perfection to harvest satisfaction. Products of parents who cushioned every fall, the young generation struggles to cope with natural flaws.
However, as students’ longing for unrealistic superbity grows, the district’s expectations for them ironically decrease. Kenneth Levine, who has taught Pre-Calculus and Algebra 2 for 35 years, has been forced to change the content of his tests, which are foreign to the ones he assessed in his early teaching years.
“Our Algebra 2 tests now are comparable to what was an Algebra 1 test 30 some years ago,” he said. “In Pre-Calc, I just gave a quiz and half of it was Algebra 1 material like factoring, combining like-terms, and adding and subtracting fractions.”
However, depletion of intelligence is not the reasoning behind these changes. Students are held to lower expectations, and consequently perform to those standards.
“We cannot expect as much out of kids outside of class. This isn’t the kids’ fault, it’s the people making the calls on district policy,” he said. “I think adults have given up on getting kids to do ‘extra work,’ because they know kids are pulled in many different directions, but some of those directions are not productive ones.”
In the school setting, levels of performance are a complete spectrum. There are students who repeatedly push themselves to exceed requirements, and others who think the system is useless and provide minimal efforts. New homework policies that prohibit penalization of late work have lowered the stakes, and completing assignments before the due date is no longer prioritized.
Beth Flannery, Modified English teacher of 30 years, once favored this approach; however, she now sees its countless flaws in action.
“When I started teaching, I didn’t like deadlines so I allowed students to turn things in whenever they wanted,” she said. “What I discovered is that when students get behind, it actually freezes them up and makes things overwhelming. They have this anxiety and don’t know what to do first. In retrospect, I think deadlines help students organize their lives and prioritize things appropriately.”
In The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt explores the overprotection young generations faced as products of gentle parenting, an approach that focuses on developing self-awareness and empathy, but is sometimes insufficient when it comes down to correcting behavior. Some students feel entitled to second chances and excuses, leading to the dismantling of expectations and deadlines that were once set in stone.
Flannery followed this gentle approach to bring up her own children. While the tactics tend to be criticized by previous generations, Flannery defends them.
“I think that my generation was parented very tough and constantly told, ‘you’re on your own,’ but I don’t think we’ve contributed a lot of positivity in the world, especially in terms of the political system and climate,” she said. “I look forward to seeing if this new generation has a kinder heart, and think that would be an incredible thing for the world. I’m not psychic but I sure am hopeful.”
There is no perfect parenting approach, and Principal Rebecca Montour is in favor of striving for balance.
“There is value in focusing on emotions and talking through them while at the same time challenging kids to push through things that are difficult,” she said. “We can support kids while still challenging them or allowing them to fail.”
Yet coddled young minds deem imperfections as shameful and unacceptable. In The Anxious Generation, Haidt attributes the toxic mindset to the phones fused to their infant hands.
“Socially prescribed perfectionism is closely related to anxiety; people who suffer from anxiety are more prone to it,” he said. “Being a perfectionist also increases your anxiety because you fear the shame of public failure from everything you do. And, as you’d expect by this point in the story, socially prescribed perfectionism began rising, across the Anglosphere nations, in the early 2010s.”
The simultaneous increase of perfectionism and social media proves their direct correlation, and Spanish teacher Erin Quesnell-Jobs can attest that students are prone to this mindset, especially regarding their grades.
“There is a disconnect between what students expect in terms of their grades and what the grading scale actually means,” she said. “Technically, a proficient score is a 75-80%. That doesn’t compute for a lot of our students, who come from middle school where it’s a lot easier to fall into the advanced category, or students who feel pressure from their parents to achieve all As.”
Jessica Hansen teaches Mental Strength and noticed athletes struggling under pressure induced by perfectionism.
“I think that since they’ve had the success, they know they can do it, whereas when we’re little and first start sports, we don’t expect to make the shot,” she said. “The more we have success, the more we expect it to happen. I also think that as time grows on, we get more self-conscious, and social media has contributed to that as well.”
To help student-athletes counteract the intuitive desire to operate without flaw, Hansen reminds them that even professionals in high-pressure leagues experience off-days.
“When athletes are struggling and putting too much pressure on themselves, I show them the statistics of the MLB players, and the number one batter in the entire major league averaged 34% of his hits this year,” she said. “That means 7 out of 10 times he batted, he failed.”
Addressing life in Hansen’s system of percentages allows students to accept their “failures” as opportunities to grow into more resilient individuals. Additionally, Quesnell-Jobs implores students to contemplate why they strive for perfection to begin with.
“I want my student’s motivation to come from a place of joy, passion, and excitement, not fear,” she said. “My goal is to help students evaluate why they are driven to get As: is it because it makes you happy or because your parents want you to or because of college? Instead of giving in to those pressures, I want them to find intrinsic motivation, and run with their passions.”
by Jazmine Blustin
Published December 2nd, 2024
Oshkosh West Index Volume 121 Issue III