You Are Not Prepared for College, Part 2: Beth Barry on Humility
Here is The MoreBrainz Blog's first guest post! Beth Barry is my colleague at Texas Lutheran University. We co-directed the Freshman Experience Program for many years and have had many conversations about how to unlock student resilience and student success. I have blogged about some of these issues before, and now it is her turn. This will be a chapter in her upcoming book, The Little Yellow Book of Writing Virtues, due out next year.
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by Beth Barry
We all knew That One Senior in high school that ran
the world. That Senior rolled in to classes late and told the teachers that the
homework was incomplete due to an impromptu trip to Hong Kong over the weekend
to save the free world. Or, That Senior who said, “I’m going to cure cancer
this summer.” Or, “Harvard? I can do better.” That Senior sounded like their
shiz was together and in alphabetical order, but secretly we knew it was too
good to be true. At graduation, as we watched That Senior dare to high-five the
principal, we hoped all the big plans would work out, but guessed there could
be a Payless Manager nametag somewhere on the road to the White House. That
Senior, like all graduates, woke up the next day to the yawning abyss of the
future, mostly not being handed over on a silver platter.
Starting over after high
school is the ultimate reboot. You thought the cloud of witnesses was on your
side. They are, but they know way more than you do and seem to be looking down
upon you with anticipation. Any time we level up, we are inclined to think that
we need to be bigger, better, and stronger than our former selves, which is
true, but not in the ways we predict. Leveling up actually requires a shrink
ray to the ego. A visit to the local planetarium will help, where we can behold
the immense stretch of night sky reaching out into infinity, and see how each
one of us is like a microscopic pebble trapped in the shoe of a gnat by
comparison, and then to the small town library that houses just over 100,000
titles, to sit in the stacks and know that they represent a tiny fraction of
the reams of fictions’ dreams and labs’ hypotheses, volumes of vectors, and
mysteries of histories, theologies, and cosmologies. Indeed, we are small.
Enter humility, the quietest of virtues to practice in
our quest for success.
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Nothing new here. All the world’s major faith
traditions teach humility. For example, Buddhists remind us to “empty our cup.”
This means that we need to make room for new learning by pouring out the old –
out with unfair assumptions, bad habits, and negative attitudes. Similarly, Christians
know that if we want to be first, we must get to the back of the line. We may
be precious in God’s eyes, but everywhere in creation is the invitation to see
how weak and work-in-progressy we are.
Why is humility so important in learning? Dr. Carol
Dweck, Professor of Psychology at Stanford, explains that if we want to learn,
we need a “growth mindset,” an attitude that we can learn chemistry, for
example, even if it’s not our strongest subject. This attitude is much more
useful than what she calls a “fixed mindset,” which thinks, “I’ll never catch
on.” Ironically, Dweck figured this out by studying the role of failure in
learning. It’s all the news now that failure is not the enemy. Dweck’s findings
show that it helps if we have suffered a few wedgies from our friend, Failure.
Choosing a growth mindset helps us to readjust the underwear and try a new path
to success. We don’t need to eat mind-altering ‘shrooms to expand our
perceptions. We only need to humble ourselves to admit that our perceptions can
and should be expanded.
The classroom, in its ideal state, is a sun-filled
work space of smiling, relaxed, appropriately humble persons who are completely
devoted to their learning, but at its most grim, it can be a sweaty battlefield
of egos, ulterior motives, loitering, and exhaustion. The day-to-day truth is
likely somewhere between these two extremes. Sometimes That One Senior morphs
into That One Jerk who disagrees with everyone and everything. A strange way to
gets one’s jollies, to be sure. Enough with the combat, I say. In college, we
are co-wallowers in the humus, remember? If you are itching for a fight, take
it to the syllabus. Or, to the ongoing street fight between
WhatYouThinkYouCanDo and WhatIsHumanlyPossible.
This is where I acknowledge that many of you already
have the Let’s Be Realistic aspect of
humility on lock. You have been telling us for years - humility says start
early. Make a plan. Give yourself enough time. Humility may not be a sexy
kitty, you admit, but she is reliable. Without her realism, we overestimate our
ability to get the job done on deadline. Notes, outlines, tutorials, office
visits, rough drafts, and revisions, are the real deal. Pride and
procrastination make us try to eat the 10-page elephant at 3 am, but you humble
realists know exactly what you can do and exactly the amount of time it will
take you to do it. For you, on time means late. Good for you! But don’t be smug
about this or you’ll disqualify yourself as humble, see how that works? Go have
some cake while I talk with the rest of us.
If you are still with me, you are probably reading
this instead of doing something that is way more important. Take heart! There
are libraries full of anti-procrastination books written just for us, which I’m
sure we’ll get to tomorrow. In the meantime, remember, you are loved and
understood, but we can’t keep enabling each other like this. I know you want me
to point out that our little monkey brains are hardwired for survival and
trained to crave the shot of adrenaline that only last-minute stress can
deliver. Fine. Just so we can also agree that pressure torques quality. Go
ahead and google Yerkes-Dodson and their stupid ∩ graph that illustrates
perfectly the relationship between stress and productivity, if you need someone
to blame. Last ditch efforts cause us to lower our standards. Earlier in the
week we aim for excellence. In the last hours before deadline, we settle for
good enough. Sometimes it’s okay to settle, but every time? It’s a dangerous
habit to low- ball it every. single. time.
This Means
Humility is the quiet hero who can rescue us from
ourselves. Guilt will do no good. Procrastination is bigger than we are. It
transcends all cultures, times, and seasons. Let’s make peace, go ahead and
vacuum under the bed if we must, but then keep that ridiculousness to an hour
or so, after which time we should gird our loins and stand like a people in
flight as we start the thing that really matters, like the next rough draft.
Let’s get to it early and ugly, scratch, scratch, scratching through the
emptiness and dread until we find a sentence that makes a tiny bit sense. If
things grind to a halt, come to office hours or bring questions to class. But
what if someone thinks we’re stupid, you ask? That’s the power of humility. It’s
willing to risk looking like an ass for the common good.
This is chapter four of The Little
Yellow Book of Writing Virtues, which I plan to use with my students in the
fall of 2017.