Take Responsibility

After the end of one academic term, I had a student write to me, complaining about his final grade. In the email, he accused me of all manner of capricious and downright nefarious grading practices. I confess that I was taken aback, not only by the vehemence of his note, but with his utter inability to even contemplate the possibility that perhaps he might have written a final paper that was lacking, either in form or content. Sadly, it was both.

The central topic of the last blog post was Embracing Mistakes, and with this entry in The Dreaded Grade series, I share my insight that doing so involves developing the ability to accept responsibility for making them. Whether it involves acknowledging what we have done or what we have left undone, owning errors is an essential element of the learning process and crucial to our ongoing development as human beings. The simple truth is that I can’t learn from my mistakes if I refuse to admit that I have made one… or if I spend my time looking for something or someone else to blame.

To be sure, sometimes circumstances beyond the entirety of your control may be impacting you. Perhaps the stress of navigating school during a global pandemic, which is hardly your fault, is presently overwhelming. Maybe your professor does kind of suck and plays favorites. Perhaps your room or house mate is way too loud, rude, and so on, making it hard to focus. You may have so many responsibilities, between work, relationships, and school, that it is challenging to juggle them. External factors do gets in our way sometimes, and we ought to notice and address issues that inhibit our progress. Then, we may choose to enact whatever power we do possess to decide how we will respond to such potential roadblocks.

Yet with this post, I am primarily concerned with encouraging you to identify challenges within yourself. To embark along the path of self-reflection and discovery. Whenever you may happen to fail to arrive at your desired destination, when you do not achieve the grade you anticipated, pause and ask yourself… where did it go wrong? What could I have done differently? What action or approach might produce an outcome more in keeping with what I had in mind?

Remember, folks, you are in the process of learning, and thus you are expected to make mistakes. When you do, taking responsibility for it does not require medieval self-flagellation, however, it does invite you into honest self-evaluation. Maybe you got off-track somewhere? Own that when that has happened. If and when you drop the ball, apologize. Then consider whether the event was a one-shot, identifiable error, from which you can then learn? Or was it reflective of a larger pattern in your life or academic work that may require adjustment and reorientation?

When facing the latter, think like a creative artist, scientist, or entrepreneur— use your imagination. What can you shift? Study habits? Your approach to solving problems? Your work/life/school balance? On the exterior impacts front, can you change that terrible professor or roommate, and if not, how might you work with or around them? Can you contact a therapist or counselor to address your feelings around the pandemic? What if you made an appointment with the learning center or with the writing lab to explore your areas of academic challenge? What if you consider that perhaps your experiences of failure thus far are not because you have done anything “wrong,” per se, but simply because you might have an undiagnosed learning disability? Whatever potential issues you identify, explore how might you benefit from reaching out to gain another perspective and significant support from your peers, advisors, mentors, tutors, or campus professionals. Once you face your previous mis-steps and take ownership of your next ones, Dear Reader, you will be freer to regroup and reconfigure, decide upon a new learning strategy, and then try again.