Every year at this time — early March, with just enough winter left to make the rest of the year feel interminable — the high school’s National Honor Society chapter invites students to join. The first invitations are based on the student’s cumulative GPA1; the application, however, stresses a wide range of skill, straits, and knowledge.
The most interesting requirement might be character, which gets its first definition in the NHS guide to becoming a member:
The student of good character is cooperative; demonstrates high standards of honesty and reliability; shows courtesy, concern, and respect for others; and generally maintains a clean disciplinary record.
Searching their website for a bit will lead you to a more thorough definition, which is well worth reading in full. In that address, the president of Trinity Washington University in Washington, D.C., states that
[c]olleges and universities seek students who demonstrate high moral character. University leaders desire students who will contribute richly to a campus community, not only through scholarship, leadership, service, and citizenship, but with a mutually inclusive commitment to trust, honor, and respect.
She ends by telling her audience — students preparing to apply to and attend college — to “remember the influence your character has on your opportunities, relationships, and future contributions to society.”
The National Honor Society doesn’t have a monopoly on character, of course. Character matters to every student preparing to apply to and attend college, which is why it’s one of the essential skills and traits in Brewster’s SCP and our makerspace’s grade abatement profiles:
This “ongoing, underlying focus on the individual learning experience” is dependent on a student’s character. Individualizing learning2 requires a strong sense of who that individual is.
Which is why you see articles like this one, from Bucknell Magazine, stressing character, not GPAs and SATs, as critical to “an open and holistic process of recognizing talent.” Read the entire piece below:
In the end, this is not about the National Honor Society at all. It’s a larger conversation around character and its role in school cultures, from high school to college. The March emergence of NHS simply gives us the occasion to discuss and to write about character.
It’s worth noting, as we move on, that while NHS is a net positive in school, it does succumb to some weird logic. Click for the xkcd site, or go here for an explanation of the comic.
Defining Character
To write about character requires a definition of character, even before we launch the writing process. This definition will change through discussion and reflection, but we need a starting point. I’d suggest the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, which often addressed “building character” through Calvin’s interactions with his dad.
After reading a set of such strips, you should see the way a child’s perception of “character” conflicts with an older generation’s definition. It’s an interesting starting point, and it lets us return to the academic definition with a clearer perspective.
Start with what Patricia McGuire, president of Trinity Washington University, gave as her definition of character:
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a concern for and personal commitment to a community
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an individual’s integrity, honesty, and trust
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an unwavering pledge to abide by established policies and regulations
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a willingness to stand and be an advocate for those who are experiencing adversity
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a demonstrated commitment to fairness and social justice
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a respect for the rights, needs, reputation, and intellectual and physical property of others
Each term and phrase in that list can be unpacked, discussed, etc., to draw us closer to our own definition. We can then compare that to the criteria given by the National Honor Society itself. NHS indicates that a student of character:
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takes criticism willingly and accepts recommendations graciously;
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consistently exemplifies desirable qualities of behavior (cheerfulness, friendliness, poise, stability);
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upholds principles of morality and ethics;
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cooperates by complying with school regulations concerning property, programs, office, halls, etc.;
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demonstrates the highest standards of honesty and reliability;
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shows courtesy, concern, and respect for others; observes instructions and rules;
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exhibits concentration and sustained attention as shown by perseverance and application to studies;
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manifests truthfulness in acknowledging obedience to rules, avoiding cheating in written work, and showing unwillingness to profit by the mistakes of others;
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actively helps rid the school of bad influences or environment.
These are interesting criteria to analyze. Pay attention to adverbs and adjectives, to abstract ideas like “morality and ethics,” and to the significant overlap between these criteria and our set of universal skills and traits3.
Writing a Character Essay
If you’ve invested in this interstitial post so far, you’ve already done a fair bit of the first part of our writing process:
Now we can tie your background reading, critical thinking, and definitional work into a formal prompt:
Write an essay about your character.
Use the writing process to do this. Here is a direct link to the printed document:
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Start with the prompt, which is a deceptively simple one. You’ll need to think about your audience, your purpose, the sorts of clichés that abound in the more rote character essays — and then it’s a matter of finding an approach that explores your character in a unique and authentic way.
This sort of essay can be explicitly about selling yourself, including language that specifically references an application process (“I would be a good fit for these reasons”), but the best responses will do this more subtly, often by letting the storytelling guide the reader. Showing, not telling, will be our goal.
It is all embedded in the writing process itself. Use the digital or printed version, and remember that the makerspace is built for this kind of exercise. You are solving an authentic problem: how to write a character essay about yourself in a world that increasingly demands that you demonstrate great character.
Use the comment section to ask questions about the process, or to comment on some of this background reading and definitional work. We will do the bulk of our writing work in class, together, and probably without screens. This is an opportunity to prep at home and embrace the physicality of writing in school.
Keep something in mind: This is the first year that juniors will write their college essay at the end of the year, instead of writing it at the start of their senior year. Our character essay is a precursor to that, and many of your responses will be useful to us in May and June. This prompt does not, however, carry with it any restrictions on word count, subject matter, and style.
Let’s find the river.
As always, I would point interested stakeholders toward Alfie Kohn and Jerry Jesness for a crash course in why GPA might not be the best starting point, even if it is the most straightforward way to sort students. ↩
And it may always haunt me, like Marley haunting Scrooge, that “individualizing” is erroneously capitalized in this printed/posted/publicized version of our universal skills and traits. ↩
Note, for instance, that “tak[ing] criticism willingly” is amenability. Collegiality and empathy are shown through “courtesy, concern, and respect for others.” This is universal stuff, and that should help us in writing. ↩