9 ms·

High school teacher tells graduating students: you’re not special

109 points by stfu 14y ago

willwashburn 14y ago
This especially hits home with me, since I've gotten trophies and awards for pretty much anything I've ever done (including in college). Until I hit the 'real world' and realized that even though I was talented and had a lot going for me, it didn't matter: there are a million people in the same boat. My most recent realization, though, is that most people my age don't want to work too hard. We are used to getting the accolades with the default level of effort, so why bother? I'm special though, I work hard. Seriously I'm special. TELL ME I'M SPECIAL.
- AznHisoka 14y ago
  You're special, just like everyone else :)
- prezjordan 14y ago
  You sit beautifully at the peak of the bell curve :)
- amcintyre 14y ago
  > My most recent realization, though, is that most people my age don't want to work too hard. You can probably leave out "my age" and it will still be fairly accurate.
- jorgeleo 14y ago
  Of course you are special, why would you be any different?
- kaonashi 14y ago
  You're special in that you're unique; you're not special in that you innately have talents that nobody else does.
yumraj 14y ago
I have a 6 year old son, who recently finished a language class (Hindi) and a chess class. In both of these, he got a medal. Why? Because everyone got a medal. So, in end, he is happy, with a sense of achievement, but what achievement I don't know. I believe that failure in life is important, at least was for me, otherwise I would never have tried harder. But if people are given something for nothing, how do you define/measure success.
- protomyth 14y ago
  Failure has another great importance, it tells you what your good at and sets you up to try new things or ways. I love golf, but I know that no matter how much time I put into it, I won't be great. Its still a fun thing to do, but I know not to make a career of it. I failed a lot at programming at the start, but I had enough real successes to keep going. You need the honest feedback to make real decisions. This "everyone gets a medal" culture doesn't give the right feedback so people grow up and have disappointing lives until the can change or die.
  - kingkilr 14y ago
    Failure also produces a lot of false negatives though, I've failed at a lot of things not because I was bad at them (though, lord knows I have enough failures because of that), but because of bad luck, or bad instruction, or what have you.
    - billswift 14y ago
      Failure is a better signal than success though. You can also succeed through luck and other mostly irrelevant circumstances; but if you are trying to succeed, then you only fail despite your efforts.
      - argv_empty 14y ago
        Both cases still require examination of the situation to determine whether the success/failure is attributable to luck, skill, effort, etc.
BrianHV 14y ago
It sounds like this was a good speech. I expect few people here will disagree. I'd like to remark, though, on the fact that the author called this "controversial advice," while going on to describe not a controversy, but instead "overwhelmingly positive" reaction. Recently I've been trying to think about stories like these. Stories where someone speaks the truth that society doesn't want to hear, and people rally around the truth teller. I try to ask myself who's in this willfully deaf society if everyone I see supports the truth. And in this case, I suspect we're still seeing some inertia from the self-esteem movement to which the speaker alludes. But is there a deep controversy? Is David McCullough a brave whistleblower speaking against a near-unanimous wrong? Or is the New York Daily News making a big deal out of someone saying what we all already know?
- protomyth 14y ago
  I think it is very prevalent in the k-12 school system. The everyone-gets-a-medal culture has an odd symbiotic relationship with the zero-tolerence mantra practiced at that level.
- planetguy 14y ago
  Self-esteem culture is like nuclear armament. Everybody complains about it but nobody wants to do anything about it individually; why would you want to be the one to break the little kids' hearts by denying 'em a medal even though they tried really hard and just happen to suck. Alternatively, self-esteem culture is like "morons who can't drive". Everybody complains about it, but the people who actually cause the problem lack the self-awareness to see that they are the problem even when they're complaining about it. Probably a little bit of both.
  - JumpCrisscross 14y ago
    Actually, the morons who can't drive problem is easily rectified by raising the bar on getting a driver's licence. In Deutschland, where getting licences is a rigorous process, the problem is largely absent. Similar to awards and A's, driving has come to be seen as a right and not a privilege.
mikeevans 14y ago
Unrelated to the content itself, but isn't it annoying how the article is littered with links to other articles?
- planetguy 14y ago
  I had to go back and look at the text carefully to even notice it.
- pavel_lishin 14y ago
  It reminds me of the Starship Troopers movie, actually, and it's incredibly annoying.
jcdreads 14y ago
Full text of the speech: http://www.boston.com/yourtown/news/wellesley/2012/06/youre_not_special_teacher_tell.html?p1=Well_Local_YourTownlinks http://www.boston.com/yourtown/news/wellesley/2012/06/youre_...
- js2 14y ago
  It's easier to read here: http://www.theswellesleyreport.com/2012/06/wellesley-high-grads-told-youre-not-special/ http://www.theswellesleyreport.com/2012/06/wellesley-high-gr... (All on one page, no interspersed ads, better formatting.)
  - tytso 14y ago
    The website's bandwidth has been maxed out. Google webcache here: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:wQU2TYMPxZkJ:www.theswellesleyreport.com/2012/06/wellesley-high-grads-told-youre-not-special/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:wQU2TYM...
PaulHoule 14y ago
Chris Lasch wrote the book on this in 1976 http://www.amazon.com/The-Culture-Narcissism-Diminishing-Expectations/dp/0393307387 http://www.amazon.com/The-Culture-Narcissism-Diminishing-Exp...
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
daenz 14y ago
Overall I think there is some truth in is message, but the answer to one extreme is not another extreme...it's no extremes. Everyone is unique and special, just not as unique as our egos like to make us think. We're also all very similar under a broad enough lens. Honestly, it sounds like the teacher has some underlying issues with himself (and students) that expressed themselves in this speech. He couldn't have seriously thought a 10-minute speech would change a lifetime of behavior.
pedrobeltrao 14y ago
I wanted to add a perspective from someone who comes from a European country (Portugal) and have been living in the California for the past 4 and half years. Forgive me for the generalizations but one thing that I admire about Americans (at least Californians) is the strong positive "can-do" attitude to life. A fire that gets people to start their own businesses and think of new opportunities. It is obviously hard to pint-point the origin of any cultural trait but I believe that it also stems from the positive re-enforcement that this article is talking about. Along with most people of my generation that I know of, I was brought up with exactly the sort of message that this teacher is conveying ("you're not special"). I really think this contributes to the fact that Portuguese are one of the most risk averse people in the world. Even when we start our own businesses we pick very safe jobs (http://mvalente.eu/2011/03/08/the-paradox-of-portuguese-entrepreneurship/ http://mvalente.eu/2011/03/08/the-paradox-of-portuguese-entr...) I realize that it might be exaggerated positive re-enforcement in the US and that this can have very serious negative consequences. Learning to fail and balancing your future expectations is a requirement for good mental health. Just keep in mind that there are certainly good things about this attitude.
- refurb 14y ago
  The positive encouragement model of raising/educating children is a relatively new thing in the US, so I don't think it has much to do with the "can-do" mentality. I'm in my mid-30s and we certainly didn't have it in school when I was growing up. I can remember my brother getting held back a grade. If anything, I think its the current model that threatens the "can-do" attitude of the US, since I think a lot of the "can-do" attitude is really resilience. It an attitude that says "this won't be easy and I might fail, but I can always get up and try again". If kids gets nothing but positive reinforcement, those initial failures are going to be particularly painful and discouraging. I think parents can teach their children so much by letting them fail (within boundaries) and giving them not self-confidence that they can do anything, but the self-confidence that they can handle any hardship. That's an important difference. Before I start getting downvoted, I just want to say I haven't start yelling at kids to "get off my lawn!!" yet. :P
  - 14y ago
theorique 14y ago
You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everything else.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- rsanchez1 14y ago
  Well, at least high school graduates are not yet decaying since they have yet to reach their prime. After you reach your peak biologically, you are decaying organic matter.
  - jack-r-abbit 14y ago
    In a way, you pretty much begin dying as soon as you are born. That is not meant to be something morbid. But everybody sheds dead skin everyday.
rytis 14y ago
Can I do better than 50% of my classroom mates? If yes then I am ok. Can i do better than 90% ? If yes then I am special.
- bilbo0s 14y ago
  Only if your classmates can do better than 90% of the rest of the developed and emerging world. THAT is the real question. And, frankly, for the vast majority of Americans... an honest answer to that question sucks to think about.
  - r00fus 14y ago
    That would put you in the 1%, right? I posit that even being in the top 10% is probably fine. The problem is a global economic system that isn't growing with the population and funneling the money to the 1%, as opposed to the 10% (which now just get by), much less 50 or 100% of the humans on the planet.
- pbhjpbhj 14y ago
  Better at what? Special to whom?
- davidkobilnyk 14y ago
  Even if you got perfect grades on everything you did, how is that special? Perhaps you merely provided the expected answers and work to everything. Being special should involve doing something untested, maybe even scoring badly on the tests in the meantime.
wilschroter 14y ago
This topic seems to get re-hashed every few weeks on HN. Sort of getting tired of hearing about it.
- rsanchez1 14y ago
  At least it's not the exact same story getting re-hashed ten times in a day, which happens fairly often on HN.
rsanchez1 14y ago
In a world that makes sense, this wouldn't be a big deal, because (most) graduating high school students really aren't special. We aren't all be a Jobs or a Gates or a Zuckerberg. But in today's society, this is making waves due to reasons the teacher cites in his commencement speech: because Americans have come to appreciate accolades more than genuine achievement.
- pbhjpbhj 14y ago
  Being 'special' as an adult doesn't mean you were special in a particular way as a child though does it?
magicalist 14y ago
Oh, HN, so grumpy. What no one here has mentioned yet is that for most people, after you get out of school, you won't be winning first place and yet you will be rewarded (with a paycheck) for just showing up and doing a fairly average job. The other comments with walking a fine line with this are spot on. How quickly we forget another piece of favorite HN repostery: praise kids for effort, not for being smart (or some other supposedly intrinsic quality). Yes, the kid that shows up, sticks his finger up his nose and receives a participation prize has learned little, but the kid that showed up, worked really hard, and totally failed might still get something out of it.
- drivebyacct2 14y ago
  I totally agree with you, although getting a "fairly average job" is easier said that done for those who aren't at least somewhat exceptional.
  - Negitivefrags 14y ago
    If it really is an average job then it can't only be taking exceptional people. You either need to redefine what you think an average job is, or redefine what you think an exceptional person is.
- jack-r-abbit 14y ago
  But they will be in for a surprise when get to that first job interview and don't get the job just for showing up. Getting a job is the real prize. And they usually don't hand those out just for showing up.
dbbolton 14y ago
Sorry for the off-topic remark, but I really couldn't believe that this website uses what amounts to ads to separate paragraphs. I was honestly too irritated and distracted to finish reading the article.
jack-r-abbit 14y ago
Even if you're one in a million, on a planet of 6.8 billion that means there are nearly 7,000 people just like you. That right there is probably the best summary of all.
mattm 14y ago
Everyone is different yet everyone is the same
lsc 14y ago
man, where did you guys go to high school? it was, by far, the most difficult and unpleasant thing I've ever experienced. People were harder on me in high school than they ever have been in the what, 14 years after? I had to work far harder than ever after, and the rewards were nearly non-existent, compared to having a "real job" I mean, I've heard about these stories, but really? high school is miserable. You get shat upon by nearly everyone, and nobody has any sympathy. Add to that the usual confusion of puberty and of trying to develop your own framework of morals and life philosophy, and it's rough. But yeah... from what I remember? this idea that "you are not special" or, at least, "you are not special in the good way" was pounded into you, all day, every day. I'm having a hard time believing things changed that dramatically in the last 14 years. I suspect the difference was that I went to one of the worst schools in the state, while many of these complaints are about good schools in good areas; the schools people fight to get their kids into.
- ImprovedSilence 14y ago
  I have a tendency to agree with you. But I'd go one step further and say that in college, at least from a classroom standpoint, teachers were the hardest on you, and the least likely to give a crap about you. It was up to you to go home and understand the material, no time for pampering or pats on the back there.
dromidas 14y ago
I kind of want there to be a fan club for this guy. He rocks.

109 points by stfu 14y ago

This especially hits home with me, since I've gotten trophies and awards for pretty much anything I've ever done (including in college). Until I hit the 'real world' and realized that even though I was talented and had a lot going for me, it didn't matter: there are a million people in the same boat. My most recent realization, though, is that most people my age don't want to work too hard. We are used to getting the accolades with the default level of effort, so why bother? I'm special though, I work hard. Seriously I'm special. TELL ME I'M SPECIAL.

AznHisoka 14y ago
You're special, just like everyone else :)
prezjordan 14y ago
You sit beautifully at the peak of the bell curve :)
amcintyre 14y ago
> My most recent realization, though, is that most people my age don't want to work too hard. You can probably leave out "my age" and it will still be fairly accurate.
jorgeleo 14y ago
Of course you are special, why would you be any different?
kaonashi 14y ago
You're special in that you're unique; you're not special in that you innately have talents that nobody else does.

yumraj 14y ago

I have a 6 year old son, who recently finished a language class (Hindi) and a chess class. In both of these, he got a medal. Why? Because everyone got a medal. So, in end, he is happy, with a sense of achievement, but what achievement I don't know. I believe that failure in life is important, at least was for me, otherwise I would never have tried harder. But if people are given something for nothing, how do you define/measure success.

protomyth 14y ago
Failure has another great importance, it tells you what your good at and sets you up to try new things or ways. I love golf, but I know that no matter how much time I put into it, I won't be great. Its still a fun thing to do, but I know not to make a career of it. I failed a lot at programming at the start, but I had enough real successes to keep going. You need the honest feedback to make real decisions. This "everyone gets a medal" culture doesn't give the right feedback so people grow up and have disappointing lives until the can change or die.
- kingkilr 14y ago
  Failure also produces a lot of false negatives though, I've failed at a lot of things not because I was bad at them (though, lord knows I have enough failures because of that), but because of bad luck, or bad instruction, or what have you.
  - billswift 14y ago
    Failure is a better signal than success though. You can also succeed through luck and other mostly irrelevant circumstances; but if you are trying to succeed, then you only fail despite your efforts.
    - argv_empty 14y ago
      Both cases still require examination of the situation to determine whether the success/failure is attributable to luck, skill, effort, etc.

BrianHV 14y ago

It sounds like this was a good speech. I expect few people here will disagree. I'd like to remark, though, on the fact that the author called this "controversial advice," while going on to describe not a controversy, but instead "overwhelmingly positive" reaction. Recently I've been trying to think about stories like these. Stories where someone speaks the truth that society doesn't want to hear, and people rally around the truth teller. I try to ask myself who's in this willfully deaf society if everyone I see supports the truth. And in this case, I suspect we're still seeing some inertia from the self-esteem movement to which the speaker alludes. But is there a deep controversy? Is David McCullough a brave whistleblower speaking against a near-unanimous wrong? Or is the New York Daily News making a big deal out of someone saying what we all already know?

protomyth 14y ago
I think it is very prevalent in the k-12 school system. The everyone-gets-a-medal culture has an odd symbiotic relationship with the zero-tolerence mantra practiced at that level.
planetguy 14y ago
Self-esteem culture is like nuclear armament. Everybody complains about it but nobody wants to do anything about it individually; why would you want to be the one to break the little kids' hearts by denying 'em a medal even though they tried really hard and just happen to suck. Alternatively, self-esteem culture is like "morons who can't drive". Everybody complains about it, but the people who actually cause the problem lack the self-awareness to see that they are the problem even when they're complaining about it. Probably a little bit of both.
- JumpCrisscross 14y ago
  Actually, the morons who can't drive problem is easily rectified by raising the bar on getting a driver's licence. In Deutschland, where getting licences is a rigorous process, the problem is largely absent. Similar to awards and A's, driving has come to be seen as a right and not a privilege.

mikeevans 14y ago

Unrelated to the content itself, but isn't it annoying how the article is littered with links to other articles?

planetguy 14y ago
I had to go back and look at the text carefully to even notice it.
pavel_lishin 14y ago
It reminds me of the Starship Troopers movie, actually, and it's incredibly annoying.

jcdreads 14y ago

Full text of the speech: http://www.boston.com/yourtown/news/wellesley/2012/06/youre_not_special_teacher_tell.html?p1=Well_Local_YourTownlinks http://www.boston.com/yourtown/news/wellesley/2012/06/youre_...

js2 14y ago
It's easier to read here: http://www.theswellesleyreport.com/2012/06/wellesley-high-grads-told-youre-not-special/ http://www.theswellesleyreport.com/2012/06/wellesley-high-gr... (All on one page, no interspersed ads, better formatting.)
- tytso 14y ago
  The website's bandwidth has been maxed out. Google webcache here: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:wQU2TYMPxZkJ:www.theswellesleyreport.com/2012/06/wellesley-high-grads-told-youre-not-special/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:wQU2TYM...

PaulHoule 14y ago

Chris Lasch wrote the book on this in 1976 http://www.amazon.com/The-Culture-Narcissism-Diminishing-Expectations/dp/0393307387 http://www.amazon.com/The-Culture-Narcissism-Diminishing-Exp...

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

daenz 14y ago

Overall I think there is some truth in is message, but the answer to one extreme is not another extreme...it's no extremes. Everyone is unique and special, just not as unique as our egos like to make us think. We're also all very similar under a broad enough lens. Honestly, it sounds like the teacher has some underlying issues with himself (and students) that expressed themselves in this speech. He couldn't have seriously thought a 10-minute speech would change a lifetime of behavior.

pedrobeltrao 14y ago

I wanted to add a perspective from someone who comes from a European country (Portugal) and have been living in the California for the past 4 and half years. Forgive me for the generalizations but one thing that I admire about Americans (at least Californians) is the strong positive "can-do" attitude to life. A fire that gets people to start their own businesses and think of new opportunities. It is obviously hard to pint-point the origin of any cultural trait but I believe that it also stems from the positive re-enforcement that this article is talking about. Along with most people of my generation that I know of, I was brought up with exactly the sort of message that this teacher is conveying ("you're not special"). I really think this contributes to the fact that Portuguese are one of the most risk averse people in the world. Even when we start our own businesses we pick very safe jobs (http://mvalente.eu/2011/03/08/the-paradox-of-portuguese-entrepreneurship/ http://mvalente.eu/2011/03/08/the-paradox-of-portuguese-entr...) I realize that it might be exaggerated positive re-enforcement in the US and that this can have very serious negative consequences. Learning to fail and balancing your future expectations is a requirement for good mental health. Just keep in mind that there are certainly good things about this attitude.

refurb 14y ago
The positive encouragement model of raising/educating children is a relatively new thing in the US, so I don't think it has much to do with the "can-do" mentality. I'm in my mid-30s and we certainly didn't have it in school when I was growing up. I can remember my brother getting held back a grade. If anything, I think its the current model that threatens the "can-do" attitude of the US, since I think a lot of the "can-do" attitude is really resilience. It an attitude that says "this won't be easy and I might fail, but I can always get up and try again". If kids gets nothing but positive reinforcement, those initial failures are going to be particularly painful and discouraging. I think parents can teach their children so much by letting them fail (within boundaries) and giving them not self-confidence that they can do anything, but the self-confidence that they can handle any hardship. That's an important difference. Before I start getting downvoted, I just want to say I haven't start yelling at kids to "get off my lawn!!" yet. :P
- 14y ago

theorique 14y ago

You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everything else.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
rsanchez1 14y ago
Well, at least high school graduates are not yet decaying since they have yet to reach their prime. After you reach your peak biologically, you are decaying organic matter.
- jack-r-abbit 14y ago
  In a way, you pretty much begin dying as soon as you are born. That is not meant to be something morbid. But everybody sheds dead skin everyday.

rytis 14y ago

Can I do better than 50% of my classroom mates? If yes then I am ok. Can i do better than 90% ? If yes then I am special.

bilbo0s 14y ago
Only if your classmates can do better than 90% of the rest of the developed and emerging world. THAT is the real question. And, frankly, for the vast majority of Americans... an honest answer to that question sucks to think about.
- r00fus 14y ago
  That would put you in the 1%, right? I posit that even being in the top 10% is probably fine. The problem is a global economic system that isn't growing with the population and funneling the money to the 1%, as opposed to the 10% (which now just get by), much less 50 or 100% of the humans on the planet.
pbhjpbhj 14y ago
Better at what? Special to whom?
davidkobilnyk 14y ago
Even if you got perfect grades on everything you did, how is that special? Perhaps you merely provided the expected answers and work to everything. Being special should involve doing something untested, maybe even scoring badly on the tests in the meantime.

wilschroter 14y ago

This topic seems to get re-hashed every few weeks on HN. Sort of getting tired of hearing about it.

rsanchez1 14y ago
At least it's not the exact same story getting re-hashed ten times in a day, which happens fairly often on HN.

rsanchez1 14y ago

In a world that makes sense, this wouldn't be a big deal, because (most) graduating high school students really aren't special. We aren't all be a Jobs or a Gates or a Zuckerberg. But in today's society, this is making waves due to reasons the teacher cites in his commencement speech: because Americans have come to appreciate accolades more than genuine achievement.

pbhjpbhj 14y ago
Being 'special' as an adult doesn't mean you were special in a particular way as a child though does it?

magicalist 14y ago

Oh, HN, so grumpy. What no one here has mentioned yet is that for most people, after you get out of school, you won't be winning first place and yet you will be rewarded (with a paycheck) for just showing up and doing a fairly average job. The other comments with walking a fine line with this are spot on. How quickly we forget another piece of favorite HN repostery: praise kids for effort, not for being smart (or some other supposedly intrinsic quality). Yes, the kid that shows up, sticks his finger up his nose and receives a participation prize has learned little, but the kid that showed up, worked really hard, and totally failed might still get something out of it.

drivebyacct2 14y ago
I totally agree with you, although getting a "fairly average job" is easier said that done for those who aren't at least somewhat exceptional.
- Negitivefrags 14y ago
  If it really is an average job then it can't only be taking exceptional people. You either need to redefine what you think an average job is, or redefine what you think an exceptional person is.
jack-r-abbit 14y ago
But they will be in for a surprise when get to that first job interview and don't get the job just for showing up. Getting a job is the real prize. And they usually don't hand those out just for showing up.

dbbolton 14y ago

Sorry for the off-topic remark, but I really couldn't believe that this website uses what amounts to ads to separate paragraphs. I was honestly too irritated and distracted to finish reading the article.

jack-r-abbit 14y ago

Even if you're one in a million, on a planet of 6.8 billion that means there are nearly 7,000 people just like you. That right there is probably the best summary of all.

mattm 14y ago

Everyone is different yet everyone is the same

lsc 14y ago

man, where did you guys go to high school? it was, by far, the most difficult and unpleasant thing I've ever experienced. People were harder on me in high school than they ever have been in the what, 14 years after? I had to work far harder than ever after, and the rewards were nearly non-existent, compared to having a "real job" I mean, I've heard about these stories, but really? high school is miserable. You get shat upon by nearly everyone, and nobody has any sympathy. Add to that the usual confusion of puberty and of trying to develop your own framework of morals and life philosophy, and it's rough. But yeah... from what I remember? this idea that "you are not special" or, at least, "you are not special in the good way" was pounded into you, all day, every day. I'm having a hard time believing things changed that dramatically in the last 14 years. I suspect the difference was that I went to one of the worst schools in the state, while many of these complaints are about good schools in good areas; the schools people fight to get their kids into.

ImprovedSilence 14y ago
I have a tendency to agree with you. But I'd go one step further and say that in college, at least from a classroom standpoint, teachers were the hardest on you, and the least likely to give a crap about you. It was up to you to go home and understand the material, no time for pampering or pats on the back there.

dromidas 14y ago

I kind of want there to be a fan club for this guy. He rocks.