Spoiled or Just Ripe?

Stephen Covey invites us to "begin with the end in mind" if we wish to achieve our goals. Good teachers use this advice all the time. We think of what we expect students to be able to do - assessment, in our jargon - and then give them the teaching and support they need to do it - scaffolding, we often call it. It strikes me that more broadly, leadership involves considering what end goals we have as well, so that our activity proves fruitful and not merely busy. Just as a farmer would be wise to consider the type of crop she wants to produce before farming, so school leaders should think about the types of people they hope their students are becoming.

This is less obvious than you would think, though.

The other day I walked into the teachers' room and stumbled upon a colleague of mine talking with a student that both she and I know and love. It was unusual to see a student just hanging out in the teachers' room in our school, a building with pretty traditional attitudes - if not always practices - toward chewing gum, last names, and exclusive - if not so well-equipped - teacher space. While the young woman was in the teachers' bathroom (another no-no) my colleague remarked to me in private that the student was really spoiled.

For a moment, I agreed. Here's a young woman who has one teacher who not infrequently takes her out to lunch and another who recently drove her several towns away to a scholarship interview. This is a woman who rolls into the teacher's lounge, or just about anywhere else in school, with boldness and who calls teachers by their first names and chats them up like old friends. This is a student who's part of a first-rate college preparatory program and has several supportive adults rooting for her at every turn. She's not anywhere near as meek or as generally deprived as her peers.

Which, as may be obvious at this point, is a wonderful thing.

As I reconsidered this young woman and that word "spoiled", I realized that she's not spoiled; she's simply well supported and cared for. She assumes she's worth others' attention and worth some quality treatment in her own school.

Sometimes those of us that help run high schools develop some bad habits. We want our students - especially the many who have been beaten down by life at far too young an age - to confidently navigate their worlds, to develop a firm sense of self, to access opportunities to be treated with dignity and care. And yet it makes our lives easier if they accept less than that, if they're willing to meekly shuffle along without expecting the best for themselves.

Well, that's a habit of thinking that we need to drop. Would that all students in my school expected warm and affirming relationships with their teachers. Would that all of them expected quality support for their dreams. Would that they all had a little more confidence, a little more boldness, and a lot more blessings in their lives.

See, I don't think this young woman is spoiled. That's the word for a fruit - or a person - that's gone bad through neglect, or through too much of a good thing. Instead, she's ripe. She's actually getting the attention and care that all young people need to be tasty and useful, to be people that add to the world and radiate with health.

Wanting students that are ripe, not spoiled, but also not hard and underdeveloped - beginning with that end in mind - changes our practice. To get hard, forever unripe students, we can just neglect them and treat them like the junk they fear they might be. To get spoiled students, we give them the type of "care" that asks nothing from them, that patronizes them perhaps while not expecting them to step up at all. To get ripe students, though, we need to give and give and give. They need seemingly endless amounts of care and opportunity and challenge. But it always needs to ask something of them, to ask them for greater responsibility, greater self-respect, greater hope.

No one gets there on their own. They get "spoiled" into it.