Perfectionism
Two years ago, I received a thank you card from Nina, one of my Year 11 students, when she finished her GCSE exams. In this beautifully written, neat and thoughtful card Nina thanked me, among other things, for teaching her humility. I have thought about this card often in a rather rueful manner because lovely, high achieving Nina was thanking me for a conversation that we had about failure. After her mock examinations, she brimmed overfull with anxiety, fretting about whether she could achieve the level 9s that she wanted. Talking with her and her mother at a parents’ evening, I could see Nina pushing herself towards the Cambridge application that she intended to submit in the first term of Year 13. She was a full eighteen months ahead of herself. And yet, Oxbridge applications do require excellent GCSE results and so Nina did indeed need to strive for something close to perfection.
Managing this situation — a student’s need to perform at a high level and his or her psychological fragility — is both a challenge and a significant pastoral responsibility. Just occasionally, I teach a student who thrives on the hunt for excellence and who manages his or her adrenaline levels with all the skill of an athlete. These students are rare, however, and more often teachers find themselves supporting worried young people who feel a tremendous amount of pressure to produce great work, get excellent exam results, make their families proud, win university places and earn a place for themselves in a competitive world. Some parents ask their children to text them a test result as soon as they receive it and my stomach churns with worry for the students who fear a parent’s response to a less than brilliant assessment result. My instinct is always to hide these students in the book cupboard rather then let them go home to shouting and recrimination.
The only way that I know how to manage the menacing spectres of perfection and perfectionism is to develop a classroom culture in which success and failure are concepts that we discuss regularly and consistently throughout the academic year.
This needs to start early in the Autumn Term and certainly before the first piece of work is marked. With a new Year 7 class, this conversation is likely to begin when a student becomes upset about a forgotten class reading book or a mislaid pencil case. Or perhaps when one of these wee ones has been slapped with a detention early in this first term of secondary school. These situations allow for gentle whole-class chats about the stresses and strains of being new and how important (or not) it is to get everything right first time. With aYear 10 class such a conversation might be triggered by the raw frustration of a dyslexic student who is infuriated by a reading task, and this allows me to talk about my own failures with the group. If a student who needs reading support becomes angry in my lesson then is it because I have not provided sufficient support or properly briefed my teaching assistant? Acknowledging these sorts of busy-day errors invariably helps to defuse tension and build students’ trust in me.
With Sixth Form classes, conversations about lapses in perfection can emerge from worries about not-so-good GCSE results and the tentacle fears that reach towards the next set of public exams. These are great dialogues to have with students because it is so important to interrogate the concepts of achievement and perfection, of what it means to get it right and to get it wrong. And it is vital that the F word — failure — gets a pummelling in this process. I try to treat this word with both gravity and humour. Whatever it might mean to an individual, failure can be a painful experience with serious consequences. But there are times when failure must not be taken too seriously. I encourage my students to identify their own ‘failures’ in categories: ‘the banana skin’ slip-up (homework left in step-dad’s car); ‘the hiccup’ (a forgotten deadline); “a proper whoops” (swearing in the earshot of the Headmistress); “the disaster” (skiving an assessment and getting caught), and “the epic fail” (a test score of zero). These scales of error give us a framework for discussion and they allow us to identify and share our wonky thinking. This is a lovely part of a classroom culture because students can be very kind about re-framing one another’s experiences. “It’ll be reet,” Matt reassures James, “a level 2 isn’t an epic fail, mate. More of a cock-up if you ask me. ”
This takes me back to the conversation that I had with Nina and her mother in which I encouraged her to fail, or at least to be brave enough to risk failure. What I wanted Nina to understand is that if she was not prepared to try new things, to be intellectually adventurous and to experiment with ways of learning then she might indeed be able to avoid failure but she would also limit her capacity to develop. “Have a go, mess it up and try again with another one,” I told her when discussing practice exam papers.
It was not humility that I wanted to teach Nina because humility is all about a lack of pride and, although pride is part of our collective reluctance to fail, it is a quality that relates to our public selves. It was Nina’s private self that concerned me because I wanted her to learn to be kind to herself. If students can have compassion for themselves as they learn then the F-word will lose its sting.
