A former student reached out to me this week and it triggered a conversation we had many years ago.
She had just been accepted to her dream school (Ivy League) when she asked me after class could she talk to me after school.
When she came into my class after school, she started to tell me that she has hated school for as long as she could remember. That her parents had instilled in her that if you get good grades you will get into a great college. So even though she hated school, she continued to work hard to get into her dream school which she thought would bring her happiness.
She then explained when she was accepted to her dream school how tears of joy rolled down her cheeks. All that hard work paid off and it was worth it.
The next day however, when she woke up, she was no longer happy. She came to realize that college was going to be the same as high school. She was going to have to focus on grades so that she could either get into grad school or get a good job (high paying).
You could see the sadness in her eyes when she asked me, “How do you get off the treadmill? I paused for a while since this is not the conversation, I thought we were going to have.
My response to her was that you needed to change your mindset about college. It can not be about getting to the next step but instead it should be about cultivating your passion. If you enjoy certain subjects take some more courses to either cultivate the passion or to find out that is not what you want to do.
We both then continued to discuss that there are many successful people in the world that work extremely hard at their job. That if you want to be happy you needed to find something that you were passionate about, so you were enjoying your work and not doing it for some end goal which just lead to another goal.
When she came back to visit throughout the years you could see the change in her body language. No longer tense but more relaxed, smiling more often and truly seeming to enjoy life.
The challenge is to find things that are meaningful and enjoyable to you. When you are doing work that you are passionate about you do not feel like you are on the treadmill at all.
I really connected with this post and I think it's extremely relevant for all of us seniors going through the admissions process. I never really had a dream school and at first I was frustrated that nothing stood out to me as where I wanted to be, a place I wanted to identify with; however, I've since learned that putting a college on a pedestal isn't necessarily the best thing. You get so caught up in the place and the status that you lose track of the experience. I've heard of people getting into their dream schools and not actually liking the school once they attend it, and I've also heard discussion about students who are using the end goal of a university as a means of distracting themselves from all the things in their life they wish were different, only to realize upon getting accepted that University X doesn't take away all the bad things in their life that they thought it would. Getting into a dream school isn't an end-all cure to all of the struggles you have. Students who suffer from depression in high school during the grind for a top university often find that getting in to the school didn't change how they felt. Because at the end of the day, at surface level, a school is just a school. Money is just money. A job is just a job. There's got to be something deeper for these things to be meaningful.
ReplyDeleteOn a more abstract level, I've always had a fondness for progression. I think a lot of guys in this class play some video games or phone games and know that a progression system feels gratifying to the player and keeps you invested. Well, that psychological concept is applicable to life as a whole. In school, it always felt good to see new tools and skills added to my academic capabilities. In music, slowly mastering a new piece is a great feeling. In sports, seeing how much stronger, faster, and better you have become is awesome. But, often times we get caught in the trap of only looking at the top of the progression ladder, to use Mr. Bressler's analogy. Progression systems can trap you because you always want more, you want to be a completionist. But if you only are working to reach the next objective, and then the next one after that, you miss out on a lot of the good things that come with the journey. If all you care about is reaching Floor 100 on the ladder, you might get tunnel vision and miss out on Floors 1-99. Let the little things be more than just stepping stones to the bigger ones.
This reminds me of one my favorite movie quotes, from Ferris Bueller's Day Off: "Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in awhile, you could miss it."
Cole Johnson
Thanks for taking the time to write this comment. Great insight and much better written then my blog.
ReplyDeleteI think this post relates to many people because it is not often that someone truly enjoys doing hours of homework and studying on weekends, which happen to be inevitable consequences of school. Often, I blame myself for my own disdain towards these tasks. I usually attribute it to my own laziness, or it tell myself that I will let others down if I don’t complete an assignment on time. But this negative self talk only further ensconces schoolwork in the realm of things I don’t enjoy doing, even if it gets me through the assignment I’m trying to finish. What I’ve found to be more helpful is undergoing a personal paradigm shift, telling myself that I enjoy doing the schoolwork. It wasn’t very convincing at first, but the more I did it, the more I found myself interested and intrigued by the new things I was learning. It allowed me to see the opportunities in front me that I could create through education as well as the blessings I had received up to that point. Even though doing schoolwork is typically not “fun,” I think that by changing the way you look at it you can begin to see the rewards and benefits of school (which makes it at least a little more bearable).
ReplyDeleteCasimir Pozecki
I agree with your post. On every job I have had I try to think of how to make it fun. It might be seeing who can make a pizza the faster or fold 50 boxes in a record time. This type of games allowed me to do tasks that might be boring and turn them into tasks that were fun.
ReplyDeleteI agree with this idea. I think in a way we never get off the treadmill—the grind/the rat race never stops. Good performance in high school leads to good performance in college. Good performance in college leads to a good job. At a good job, you must keep up the high performance to keep said job. I often look ahead after a tough day and question “when will this end?” There are some days which are simply hell. There is nothing fun or exciting that occurred and everything that could have went wrong went wrong. I think the goals of getting into a “good college” or getting a “good job” are relative and don’t matter. Just as you said, the reward is temporary. Yes, it’s nice to get into a dream school, BUT that symbolizes the start of more work and more stress. For me, I use other “good things” in my life to balance the stress. For example (and this sounds odd), I enjoy going to work at my minimum wage job. Why?—because I can interact with other people, get a few laughs, and the work helps me to forget about the stresses of school. Great post. Merry Christmas!
ReplyDeleteChip
Wow, I needed to hear this. I feel the same way about school at this moment. I have been working for years to get good grades to get into a good high school, and now a good college. I feel I am not going to school to better myself by learning new things, but just feel I'm trying to earn a number. I often feel I learn more things valuable to me on my own through reading articles or watching youtube videos, than in school. I do however take away values from school on work ethic that I couldn't get from a youtube video.
ReplyDeletetry to change your mindset for college so that you are going to college to learn and discover what you really love. The grades will take care of themselves
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ReplyDelete