The Good Student Trap: Research Paper Edition
I teach good students.
I write that with no sarcasm, or cynicism.
For the past 20 years, I have been teaching at a selective liberal arts university, and the students are mostly high-achieving young adults who graduated high school as A or B students.
Like me, my students also have a tendency toward the often ignored consequences of being gifted or smart — anxiety, depression, imposter’s syndrome, perfectionism.
While “good student” is a compliment, I remain convinced that performing as a good student is also, as Adele Scheele argued, a trap. Scheele posed that students learn good student habits in high school that they then apply in college, but often find those behaviors no longer are successful — or even valued by professors:
We were learning the Formula.
• Find out what’s expected.
• Do it.
• Wait for a response.And it worked.
THE GOOD STUDENT TRAP (EXCERPT), ADELE SCHEELE
But more powerful that acknowledging that good student behavior doesn’t translate into college, Scheele also confronts how the good student trap creates irrational fear:
So what’s the problem? The problem is the danger. The danger lies in thinking about life as a test that we’ll pass or fail, one or the other, tested and branded by an Authority. So, we slide into feeling afraid we’ll fail even before we do — if we do. Mostly we don’t even fail; we’re just mortally afraid that we’re going to. We get used to labeling ourselves failures even when we’re not failing. If we don’t do as well as we wish, we don’t get a second chance to improve ourselves, or raise our grades. If we do perform well, we think that we got away with something this time. But wait until next time, we think; then they’ll find out what frauds we are. We let this fear ruin our lives. And it does.
THE GOOD STUDENT TRAP (EXCERPT), ADELE SCHEELE
I often watch these dynamics with my first-year students, which I anticipate. But the most dramatic example of this tension is in my upper-level writing/research course…
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