Read the following quotation from the first guide to grade abatement. Consider its message about the impact of the choices you make every day, and then use the comment section to ask questions and start discussions about the kind of person you are building through your choices. Are you developing resilience and self-awareness? Are you becoming cynical or hopeful? Are you learning how to game the system? What are you becoming?
The Stuff that Sticks with You
When you blow off your responsibility, you are likely to fail; and without traditional grades attached, the word “fail” takes on a much more troubling connotation. You’ve heard (or said yourself) the excuses for failure: This assignment doesn’t count; this won’t be on an exam; you’re really busy right now; it’s too cold outside; it’s too nice outside; you’re a senior; you will be a senior; you’re not going to use this in your real life; your teacher is a soulless monster; who cares if other students are doing this; none of this really matters, anyway.
The simplest response to all these excuses is to point out what you’re ostensibly here to do. You are here to think, read, and write more effectively, and you are here to be exposed to good thinkers, readers, and writers. Perhaps you don’t want that, but it’s likely that learning to think, read, and write will be useful in whatever field you plan on entering. These skills make up the machinery of thought. They are the skills of life, and that makes this course fundamental to you. It doesn’t matter what kind of identity you’ve carved for yourself so far; it doesn’t matter how you’ve fared in English before now; it doesn’t even matter to this initial discussion what you hope to become in the future. Only by becoming a hermit could you hope to avoid the benefits of this course… and even as a hermit, you’d likely end up wanting to articulate your experience in some way. Henry David Thoreau, Miyamoto Musashi, and Ted Kaczynski, for instance, are all famous (or infamous) recluses who became famous only after what they wrote while secluded was published.
But the real warning isn’t about what you’ll end up lacking. It’s about what you’ll create in yourself. The ugly parts of us don’t operate on a switch. Apathy, disrespect, entitlement—these aren’t sweaters or jackets you can shrug off and cast aside when you’re tired of wearing them. That stuff will stick to you, stay with you, for a long time. When you choose not to work, you are breeding future selves, developing right now the habits that will poison or empower you in every aspect of your life. Your daily life is inculcation in its purest form: the linking together of a chain of decisions that will protect you or drag you down.
This is not some dire jeremiad, either, about your generation. You are probably—hopefully—never going to experience the effects of a sudden and obliterating choice. You should be much more concerned with the small, insidious, and irrevocable ones that you make each day, each period, and each moment. In fact, we could sum this up with a borrowed Orwellian metaphor:
Do you truly believe that disrespect, disengagement, or failure now will pass through you like a grain of corn through the body of a bird, undigested and harmless?
There is an article by James Clear, who also wrote the essay on The Akrasia Effect, about how long it takes to form a new habit, backed up by science. If you are looking to start a new habit, I would recommend reading this post.
https://jamesclear.com/new-habit
That’s an excellent find! Thank you for sharing it.
Reading this quote has made me realize that failure is not instantaneous. It is a slow and snowballing process. I think a lot of people (or maybe just me) have this misconception that failure happens in a moment, rather than over a long period of time. In addition to this, I think that people blame their failure on a single bad choice they made rather than repeated poor choices they made over time. When you see the low grade on your math test and you think “I’ve failed”, or when you get fired from a job and again you think “I’ve failed”. You finally realize that you failed, even though you have been failing for a long time prior to that moment. Everytime you chose to watch netflix instead of do math homework, or everytime you hit snooze and ended up late to work, you are setting yourself up for failure. Every poor decision you make sticks a couple snowflakes onto the snowball, and at first it’s such a small ball of snow that you don’t think much of it. But I don’t think a lot of people realize how big the snowball has gotten until it’s too late, and that’s when the moment of realization is. I think that’s why failure seems instantaneous, because people don’t realize that they are slowly failing over a period of time, they only realize that they are failing once something big changes.
A question that came to my mind after reading this post is this: What motivates us more: the fear of failure or the hope of success? Which is more effective in motivating us?
I agree that people should worry more about the small, seemingly meaningless actions they make daily rather then fear a large failure based on a choice they made in that moment. I think it is much easier to argue that you aren’t making bad choices if they come apart of your everyday life. For example if you know you don’t thrive in math or science but you don’t work any harder to get better you become okay with your failure. You make excuses like “it just doesn’t come easy to me” or “i don’t plan on pursuing a career in math anyways”. At this point you’ve made so many excuses for yourself that you don’t recognize the problem, you don’t see that it isn’t because “it doesn’t come easy to you” but in fact that you have decided to let it stay difficult for you. You have made the choice to not strive to do better and that is where the failure comes into play. You failed gradually overtime with every excuse you made for yourself. I think it would be much easier to fix the problem if you could understand that it’s the small things that eventually lead to the “big” failure like a failing test grade.
Good points. It has always seemed to me that you all are forced into those academic identities early in life, which is when you form semi-permanent associations. I hope it’s possible for all of you to recognize that a weakness in one area or with regard to one skill or trait is okay. Some weakness is natural and expected. You can still work to improve, if you are somehow given permission to be less successful than others, and your identity doesn’t have to preclude that subject or course.
I believe it’s important to build up habits. By building up good habits and doing your work, you will slowly create your character and who you are later in life. Blowing off work now builds bad habits, you become lazy, disrespectful, and entitled. These traits don´t go away, they stick with you because of bad practice, and will affect who you later in life. In the article it says, ¨When you choose not to work, you are breeding future selves, developing right now the habits that will poison or empower you in every aspect of your life.¨ By doing my work now , im building good habits and making myself a better person.
I think because we have to fill out the grade abatement profiles a couple times a quarter I am more self aware and notice and understand more of the choices I make. I am paying more attention to what I do and how I do it and I think that helps me know what works and what doesn’t for me and I think that helps me be more successful.
That’s a good testimonial. Thank you for sharing.
For me, this post shows me just how much easier it is to fall into bad habits, rather than formulate good ones. Bad habits don’t require any effort, or extra time in your life. To form a good habit, you have to keep putting in commitment and exertion, not simply putting your work off. Grade abatements mimic this kind of idea because if you don’t put in effort, you’ll get a bad result. As students, we must recognize how we must repeatedly input effort, time, and commitment in order to build good habits or develop quality products. If you’re going to be careless in your
actions, then you will never see any improvement or growth within yourself, and likely produce more insufficient products than quality.
It’s one of the ongoing frustrations we all face: It’s easier to break down than to build up. You can undo a lot of good work very quickly.
It’s entropy, really — the tendency for all systems to decay. We have to fight it.
The article “Grain Through of the Body of the Bird” presents some interesting points on the numerical association of grades and the direct relation to the motivation to do said assignments. Basically, if a student knows an assignment is not going to be graded, then they will be less likely to do it. However, once it is given a number to be entered into the gradebook, students will rush to complete it. This relates back to the Akrasia effect, as we know that doing the optional assignment will most likely benefit us, yet we choose to refrain from doing it. If we know that assignments will only make us better readers or writers, yet the Akrasia effect subconsciously limits this and drives humans to stray away from doing optional work, the question that must be asked is how does one gain the motivation and skills to be able to disregard the numerical value, and just do it anyways? Is there a specific way that someone can train their mind, or does it take just sheer willpower?
You can train your mind. You can almost rewire it, in fact. Look in the recent comments on this site for references to decision fatigue and habit-building — those are helpful keys to unlock the process.