The Freight of Expectations

When I was in college and going to bars regularly, I liked to people-watch.  When I was single, that was really guy-watching.  As an unapologetic flirt, I was always conscious of a specific Zone of Attractiveness.  I knew not to aim too high (I didn’t want to be turned down), and hoped that the beer goggles wouldn’t set in and I would aim too low (although that happened a time or two). 

I was amazed that many guys did not seem to have this same understanding of the Zone of Attractiveness.  There were a lot of less-than-appealing guys who would try to buy me drinks.  Being the ethical person that I am, I would refuse the drink unless I thought I wanted to talk to him.  One time, against my better judgment, a group of Bloomington townies managed to buy drinks for my group of friends at Jake’s (yes, back when it was Jake’s).  When one of them asked me my major, I told him I was applying to law school.   He started strutting around like a sheriff from Gunsmoke and saying, “I’m a LAWWWWman!”  Naturally, I thought he was an idiot and refused to talk to him the rest of the night.  That was when one of my philosophies of life—as only a person in her 20’s could come up with—arose:  Ugly people don’t know they’re ugly.

Recently, a close friend of mine was upset because the leader of her organization was cancelling appointments, not showing up to ones she had scheduled, and in general, not being very reliable or present.  Because my friend is hyper-responsible, she took the actions of this leader personally, and characterized them as self-indulgent. 

I have been in similar situations when people have not lived up to my expectations.  I have also felt it when I have not lived up to others’ expectations.  It is a hard thing to accept, even if it’s just viscerally, that you are disappointing others.  Not being able to meet your own expectations, or those of others, is a recipe for self-hatred.  Thinking that you “should” be able to do everything to a high standard, by a certain deadline, is the curse of high achievers. As an academic and a runner, I know a lot of them. 

Nels taught me a saying from the business world:  it’s better to under-promise and over-deliver.  The problem is, a lot of us tend to do the opposite.  We are attracted to all that is new and want to be a part of it, even if we already have too much going on.  When we cannot physically or mentally do what we promised, we feel like crap and others lose respect for us.  It’s a lose-lose situation. 

It is difficult to have compassion instead of contempt for those with whom we work who are woefully unequipped for their jobs, because of life circumstance, disposition, lack of required abilities and skills, or all of the above.  With students, my colleagues and I try to gently convince them they don’t belong in the teaching profession, with more or less success, depending on how much time, money, and psychic investment they have devoted to becoming a teacher.  Imagine what happens when somebody is already IN the profession.  That has to be much worse.  Most self-aware people know when they are not doing a good job, and they hate it.  How do they get out of it when it is how they make a living?  And what harm is done?

As a Midwesterner, I’m all about work ethic, but I also have a short attention span when it comes to doing things that don’t interest me.  When I worked for a car rental company, it was my job to add up the receipts at night and make a correct deposit.  For the life of me, I could not reconcile the accounts, so I got creative (not appreciated here, I found out), which the manager had to undo in the morning.  One time, I overheard two employees talking about me.  The guy who washed cars said, “But she has two college degrees!”  The manager replied, “She can’t add worth a shit!”  They were both correct. 

While I understand the ideals behind the Common Core State Standards, in that the developers wanted to ensure that every student has certain skills to graduate, the highly politicized nature of their creation, not to mention that actual teachers were not involved, render them highly suspect.  When my college juniors and seniors were presented with test questions on the literature exam for high school sophomores, they were unable to decipher the questions, much less answer them, and these were English majors.  If these folks were unprepared, how might high school students feel when looking at this test?   Sure, you could take one of my three routes—decide that there was a Zone where you belonged to or not; OR internalize feelings of failure when you could not live up to others’ expectations; OR get creative and make up some bullshit (the faithful go-to of all English majors).  But this teaches—and assesses—nothing about the student’s abilities to analyze literature. 

Having high expectations is fine, but they have to be individualized to the learner.  At the school where I taught, high expectations might mean a paragraph from the kid with dyslexia, or a thoughtful five page paper from the dedicated writer.  As everyone knows, some folks are good at English and bad at math and vice versa.  It doesn’t mean I shouldn’t have devoted more time to studying math, but it does mean that connecting my ability to graduate to arbitrary standards on an un-scientifically designed test is beyond wrong.    

It appears that the creators of the Common Core, like those drunk guys who thought they could pick me up, do not have an accurate understanding of the Zone of Authentic Knowledge.  Thus, students are stuck with the freight of unrealistic expectations that do not take into account their cultural and individual circumstances.  It is up to us, educators, parents, and students, to refuse the free drinks and tell the jerks that they are jerks.