Student Memo: Raise YOUR expectations

To give you a taste of the sort of population I teach. I teach a group of students who are mature, but make poor decisions that have negative academic consequences. Another thing that many of my students have in common is that they only want to get a 65 just to get out of school.

I address this attitude with an anecdote on raising their own expectations of themselves:

I start off by asking students, "If a student wants a 65 and gets a 64, should they be happy or pissed?"

Students often think that they should be really upset.

Here's my response, "Honestly, you can't be mad, because you're 99% of the way there. You've accomplished 99% of your goal to get to a 65. So why would you be mad?"

When you leave no room for mistakes, how can you possibly blame anybody other than yourself for the one mistake that costs you the 1%?  I always find it fascinating that students seem to think that their expectations are all that matter in my classroom.  Heck no, it's not about your expectations, it's about the state and city's expectations!  This is why you need to take 5 exams to graduate from high school.

One of the biggest struggles with my students is breaking this minimalist mentality of scraping by to get where they need to or where they want to go.  With many students they often see this story as a reason to doubt their abilities even further, but honestly, that's the critical-mass psychological challenge that education poses to students of extreme academic need.

I often tell my students that my grading is not a negotiation.  Where you are does not change simply because you feel that you deserve that extra point.  I also tell students that I have the utmost respect for the material that I teach because it has the ability to lead to individual greatness, but whether or not you attain that greatness is not up to your teachers or the material itself.

Science is a subject that either gets conquered by the most motivated individuals or it is the subject area that conquers the masses.  Let's not kid ourselves, science in America is treated like a joke or like sorcery compared to other countries, particularly with a decline in public awareness of current research efforts.

What I would hope readers would do to help remedy this social problem is to curb this public expectation for less.  You hear someone settling for less, you tell them they don't have a reasonable right to complain should they fail to meet their lesser standard for themselves.  You can't dig yourself out of an economic depression by hoping to just break even!

No one will fix all of the statements that include the words "I can't" or "I won't" because the biggest hurdle is not the obstacle that stands before you but your diminished expectations of yourself.