A Teacher’s Quest to Foster Resilience and Combat Fragility in Generation Z
Help stressed out, anxious, teenagers with social and emotional learning.
At the end of the fall semester, a distraught junior met with me about her grade in American History.
“This isn’t fair with all of my studying and hard work,” she said. “My parents will be angry and demand that I need to do better, that an A- is not good enough for college. You can’t give me anything less than an A.”
I’m confident in assuming that especially over the past few years, with increased stress and anxiety amongst students, teachers have noticed an uptick in this type of scenario. After doing my best to listen, I usually provide a prescribed response, which explains that unfortunately, hard work does not always yield one’s desired outcome. Moreover, students grunt when I inform them that grades are earned, not given. As for external pressures to earn only A’s, I tell my students that they should feel fulfilled as long as they try their best — and they shouldn’t let anybody tell them otherwise.
Unsatisfied with my admittedly canned advice, I’ve rethought how to support my students better after reading The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure. Coauthors Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt hit the nail on the head so often that I paused every few pages to shout out how much I agree.
Though Haidt and Lukianoff focus on higher education, teachers, students, and parents at all levels would benefit from revisiting their “Great Untruths,” especially with regard to cultivating social and emotional learning and putting disappointment into perspective.
For greater clarity on how to define social and emotional learning, I spoke with Timothy Shriver, who co-founded and now chairs the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL), the nation’s leading research organization in the field. “Social-emotional learning is the process by which [students] learn to acquire both skills and attitudes that promote responsible decision-making, healthy self-awareness, and positive relationship skills,” he said. With that in mind, I have some thoughts on how to help.
The Untruth of Fragility: What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Weaker
Several years ago, I read an interesting book, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a polymath who is now a professor of risk management at New York University.
The title seems self-explanatory, but not until considering Haidt and Lukianoff’s take on Taleb’s work did I appreciate how “antifragile,” a made-up word, holds such critical importance to the classroom. “Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty,” Taleb explains, continuing, “the resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.”
I thought of my junior who had begged me to raise her grade. In the short-term, my capitulation would have quickly eased her anxiety. But as Haidt and Lukianoff state, “If we protect children from various classes of potentially upsetting experiences, we make it far more likely that those children will be unable to cope with such events when they leave our protective umbrella.”
The best teachers strive to help foster a nurturing communities where students feel safe, protected, and supported. This is a clear asset, but educators should be careful to avoid striking a Faustian bargain, and I should take my own advice.
After a dozen years in the classroom, on more occasions than I can count, I have overlooked penalizing lateness, telling myself that students have enough on their plates with AP courses, after-school obligations, and college applications. As a young teacher, I also added a point or two to grades, not wanting to waste time arguing over whether an 89% is a B+, not an A-. I bet that others still do this, perhaps often, to avoid justifying grading policies in aggravating meetings with parents, students, and administrators. But we must resist.
If students earn C’s, D’s, and F’s, that’s what should appear on transcripts. Otherwise, educators are complicit in shaping a generation of students who can’t handle low grades and don’t know how to recover from academic struggles.
I worry about students who, having received few if any poor grades in high school, can then cope with a college professor who flat out refuses to change a grade. I recently reached out to Haidt, who provided an analogy to my concern. “When we [leave children] inside all day and let them stay glued to a screen, we’re depriving them just as surely as if we said, ‘No vitamin C until you’re 14’,” he said. “Imagine if we said to kids, ‘You can’t have any vitamin C until you’re 14. You can’t handle it.’ They would all have rickets, and then what would we do? We’d say, ’Oh, my God, our kids are sick. We’d better become even more protective!’”
Similarly, I don’t want to protect my students from dealing with the disappointment of a lower grade. I do, however, strive to help them manage and come to grips with such disappointment.
For weighty assessments, I allow one full-credit retake, which lets students know that I remain committed to seeing them master the material. This encourages students to take control of their learning, and to meet with me to review their missteps. If they still perform poorly, they meet with me again, not for another chance for a revised grade, but to speak about what should be done differently moving forward. That could include visiting me more often or getting help in the Writing Center. Either way, this retake policy encourages students to own their grades as earned, not given, whatever the letter.
I’ve found similar success in having students self-assess formal debates and seminars. This calls for students having input into an agreed-upon rubric. The majority of students grade themselves more harshly than I would, with one person writing, “I could have done more to actively listen, rather than wait for somebody to simply finish their comments.” Another student said, “I didn’t prepare for this debate and it showed. I didn’t know my stuff, and I should have spent more time reading up on the material. I don’t think I deserve anything higher than a C-, maybe lower.” All of this suggests that when students own the learning, they also own what it means to be antifragile. They look at challenges and disappointments not as a disasters, but more as stimuli, to strengthen their resolve.
The Untruth of Emotional Reasoning: Always Trust Your Feelings
Another Great Untruth challenges the belief that the intent of one’s words and actions doesn’t matter as much as how they are received. According to Haidt and Lukianoff, this cultivates a toxic “call-out culture” where young people gain social-status points for being critical before being thoughtful. As the co-authors explain,
If you teach students that intention doesn’t matter, and you also encourage students to find more things offensive (leading them to experience more negative impacts),and you also tell them that whoever says or does the things they find offensive are “aggressors,” who have committed acts of bigotry against them, then you are probably fostering feelings of victimization, anger, and hopelessness in your students. They will come to see the world — and even their university — as a hostile place where things never seem to get better.
Certainly, well-meaning actions can have negative consequences. But it’s a mistake to interpret this as a microaggression, mostly defined as an indirect, subtle, or unintentional discriminatory remark. The word “aggression” also implies an intended negative consequence, and schools do real harm by “encouraging students to interpret the actions of others in the least generous way possible,” as Haidt and Lukianoff write.
I agree with Haidt, who also told me that once a student interprets something as a microaggression, that person can feel constantly attacked, even when there is little to no reason to feel that way. “I don’t know how you recover from that. I think the damage is done. You’ve basically created a kid who experiences the world as a series of assaults,” Haidt told me.
However, let me be clear: I have zero tolerance for hate or meanness coming from anybody in my classroom. Still, I try to avoid shielding my students from offensive or even hateful speech coming from the outside world and featured in news headlines. I want my students to express themselves about Trump’s stance on immigration. I want them to discuss his rhetoric and tweets, and why his base remains steadfast in their support. I want them to discuss their thoughts on police brutality, and why some of them feel unsafe around first responders.
These are difficult conversations, for sure, and I worry about students who are looking to express their frustration also becoming more prone to take offense in day-to-day interactions when none was intended or presented. As just one example, last year, one of my students, new to school, mistakenly confused the names of two international students, who sat by each other and wore similar clothes. The international students said they didn’t take offense, but I heard whispered accusations of racism and xenophobia. To diffuse the situation, I admitted to also making similar blunders, and that in each instance I pledged to try to avoid making the same mistake. I told my students that they were too quick to judge, and that slip-ups don’t always signify malintent.
To help my students combat irrational negative beliefs, Haidt encourages teachers to consider introducing elements of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), which improves mental health by helping individuals become more aware of distorted thought patterns. According to Haidt, this includes emotional reasoning, catastrophizing, overgeneralizing, binary thinking, mind reading, labeling, negative filtering, discounting positives, and blaming. While students can visit medical experts trained in CBT, the skills involved primarily concern critical thinking, which all educators covet in the classroom.
“I think it’s important to understand that the epidemic of depression and anxiety is influencing every corner of the education world,” Haidt says, adding that more could be done to help students suffering.
I had CBT in mind when asking my history students to show empathy with figures from the past, and to avoid a rush to judgment. Some of my students were surprised upon learning, for instance, that not everyone in the antebellum South supported secession, nor the institution of slavery. Similarly, not everybody in the North supported abolition, a belief in the equality of races, or the belief that the nation should welcome immigrants. After exposing students to this reality, I asked them to take a moment to consider what absolutes they hold dear in their own lives, and whether they should reconsider some of their convictions.
I also help my students become more aware of metacognition, the ability to evaluate one’s own thought process. When they craft a thesis statement, for instance, I inquire as to how they came to conclusions, what evidence they considered along the way, and if they looked into who, if anyone, holds a differing view. Students realize that it takes time to understand the past, and I ask that they take the same care in making sense of the present.
The Untruth of Us Versus Them: Life is a Battle Between Good People and Evil People
Haidt and Lukianoff also warn against teachers’ guiding students toward a common-enemy view of identity. This is all too salient in my history and government classes, where I teach mostly liberal students, who quickly and passionately oppose what the president and Republicans champion. It would be easy for me to jump on the bandwagon, which is often tempting to do.
I worry that my students are too easily embroiled in tribalism, where they view Trump and his supporters as representing everything bad about the nation, while holding the opposite view about Democratic leaders. Washington politics don’t make it easy, but I try to teach my students that agreement shouldn’t be a precondition for opening dialogue, or even befriending someone of a different ideology. To help get this point across, I share that George W. Bush, a Republican, often feuded with the late Ted Kennedy, the former Massachusetts Democratic Senator. While the two disagreed over military actions in Iraq and tax cuts for the wealthy, they still found cause to work together on education reform.
Bush not only called Kennedy a “fabulous United States Senator,” but also stated, “the folks at the Crawford [Texas] coffee shop would be somewhat in shock when I told them that I actually like the fellow.”
Times have certainly changed, but it stands to reason that teachers should encourage young people to be open-minded, and not allow disagreement on any one issue to undermine a potential relationship. I believe strongly that educators have a duty to do this, to teach more than our discipline.
To gain a better understanding of what different sides believe, I encourage students to read news other than what pops up on social media. Now and then, I also bring a newspaper into class, and I model for students how an article I might have missed online caught my eye and motivated me to learn more.
At the same time, I caution students against gravitating toward extremities at either end of the political spectrum. I want my students to listen to each other, which neither Sean Hannity on the right nor Rachel Maddow on the left is interested doing. I also don’t want them to adopt an insular view of the world; I want them to remain curious and to question their assumptions and new ideas.
I’m comforted that Timothy Shriver of CASEL agrees. “You go back to the Middle Ages, the best teachers have been animators, have been relationship builders, have been purpose-filled teachers,” he says
Still, I ask Shriver how he responds to criticism from detractors who say that educators have no business concerning themselves with social and emotional learning, and that we should stick to focusing on content knowledge.
“I know people have come to think that we can separate information, that schools are about transmitting information onto a widget known as your brain,” he says. “That’s just wrong. You don’t walk into school with your brain. You walk in with your body, you walk in with your soul, you walk in with your heart, you walk in with your eyes and your ears, you walk in with your pain and your excitement, you walk in with your history and your hopes for the future. All of those things are a part of the learning process. There is no separation. It just doesn’t work.’”
I couldn’t put it better myself.
David Cutler teaches history, journalism, and government at Brimmer and May, an independent PK-12 school in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. Follow him on Twitter at @SpinEdu.
