Confusing excellence with perfection
I started teaching belly dance in Ateneo’s PE program in 2012, and I haven’t stopped (except for last year’s sabbatical). Every semester, I’ve seen horror on my students’ faces, as they’ve grown increasingly—and visibly—afraid of making mistakes.
I always start the semester by teaching posture and footwork, both of which help students strengthen their mind-body connection and discern their place in space. Those with dance experience get the lessons quickly, but at least three quarters of my class comprise students who think belly dance is effortless.
It is these students who often look like they want to crumble to pieces on the dance floor when they mix right, left, forward, and back; when they stumble through footwork because they don’t know where the weight of their body is; when they bump into classmates traveling in the opposite direction.
Instead of laughing and trying again, the students stare at their feet in frustration, or at themselves in the mirror with a frown nearing a sob. And every semester, I say the same thing that my belly dance teacher taught me long ago.
You will always be a beginner at something, and all beginners make mistakes. If you make a mistake onstage, own it. If you stumble, make it look like it’s part of the performance. If you do something wrong, admit that it’s your mistake, but don’t let it cripple you. In private: admit that you have weaknesses, and practice where you are weak. You are not a failure for needing practice.
Every semester since 2012, my students have taken a longer time to graduate from their initial horror to outright laughing in class. This is the part I look forward to, because it represents the breakthrough, when students realize that they don’t have to be perfect.
It’s something that I also see in my communication students. They tremble when their work isn’t graded; and when they receive anything lower than an A, they feel like failures.
The A, which is reserved for graduate-level output, is now suddenly A for average; C+ feels like the abyss, even when that is actually the average grade.
Across all my classes, many students are confusing excellence with perfection.
The sad thing is that perfection, though desired, is also a static, end state. It is the point where one does not have to learn anything more, will have no more adventures, need no longer change.
Excellence? That’s evolution, because the standard for excellence changes constantly. Excellence means admitting to one’s faults without dwelling on them, acknowledging that one is in constant reformation, accepting one’s shortcomings rather than, say, threatening to assassinate leaders to deflect attention from one’s corruption charges.
Oops! Back to the topic!
Our students are increasingly reliant on external forces, like grades, to validate their identity; when they find themselves in crisis, they also tend to blame external forces, like nature, for things that could still be in their control.
These came to mind last week as I sat with our junior faculty. One instructor said that a student tried to persuade her to move their class online due to “the atrocities brought” by a recent typhoon (which hadn’t hit the city). Another said that the students asked to be given a few more minutes to come to class, because the path to their classroom from another building was “treacherous.”
We groaned at the dramatic turn that the students had taken, but a closer look at the words also tells us a story.
To admit to difficulty or inconvenience is to also admit one’s limitations. In saying that a storm brings atrocities or that a path is treacherous, these students betray a brand of thinking that takes comfort in blaming external forces for mishaps.
A similar thing happened at the start of this semester in creativity class when I asked my students: what is creative, the person who creates or the thing they create?
My heart dropped as the students chorused: the thing they create.
I asked them why they thought so. After more questions, they admitted that it was because they didn’t want to associate the grades they received with their identity. They isolated themselves from what they created, so that if they got a low grade, then they wouldn’t be called “un-creative.” They also complained about feeling alienated from the things they made.
I pushed them to just create, on a time limit, fully credited for simply making something. At the end of the semester, they produced 20 designs. Many of the students seemed less anxious, less skeptical about the nature of errors, more willing to take control and take responsibility for their work.
More comfortable with being human.
We can’t let go of grading systems, but there has to be a way to help students understand that excellence always begins with baby steps. And as would babies taking their first steps, our students must learn how to fall and get up again, recognize how they must first change before they try to change the world, and take joy in making the errors that lead to learning.
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iponcedeleon@ateneo.edu
