Grades vs. Passion
By Rebecca Blakeney
As a student, realizing that passion might be more important than “making the grade” is the hardest thing to integrate into a work ethic that has been set since our first day of school. Ever since elementary school it has been drilled into our heads that if you don’t get good grades you can’t get into a good school. Then in high school, and once we do get into a college, we are told it is imperative that we have the best GPA or we won’t get accepted into grad school, or get the competitive job that we want. As we get a little further into our college career most of us begin to realize that we need a “well rounded education,” to create a college resume that has more than just good grades. That is all well and good, join clubs and volunteer -what ever. But the responsibilities and expectations pile up quickly on an already heavy load. And like my English professor, Dr. Kietzman said, “[with] our culture's relatively new emphasis on multi-tasking and the speed of life, our lives [are] spread so thin, [and] may be missing depth.” With the way our culture is moving, we have to be able to multitask with more things than ever, and there is no doubt that especially students are spreading themselves too thin.
The expectations placed on students do not allow for much time with any one thing, and grades often suffer in trade-off for all of these extracurricular activities. Students seem to be required to become a “jack of all trades,” while they are not allowed the time to focus on what they are passionate about; we are trading quality for quantity. I feel strongly on this point- students should be passionate about something, it is one of the reasons for the college experience -to find what that passion is and to pursue it, but many of us are left with inadequate time to discover or follow our passions as we would like to. While I do think that student organizations, clubs, volunteering etcetera have value, it has become too difficult for us to do much (if any) of this extra stuff without losing-out on the academic end. With four courses my academic load alone keeps me more than busy all week, even before I factor in, family, social and extracurricular activities, and this is the only reason I am glad not to have a job at the moment. I am one who takes great pride in my work and I do not like to settle for turning in something that is not representative of the quality of what I can produce, but because of the other demands placed on me, I do have to settle for doing work that is below my standard -simply because there are not enough hours in the day to do it all properly. It goes against my grain because my mentality is: if you are gonna do it- do it right!
I think that one of the reasons that students have more expectations placed on them now more than ever is because of technology. Everything is on demand; we all want everything immediately, including results. This shows up in our everyday technology: laptops, smart phones, DVRs and even things like movies on demand. We are growing accustomed to immediate satisfaction and so we demand it from those around us as well. It is true that this same technology also allows us to retrieve information and multitask better than ever, as we have instant access to the information we need to do our work like: email, 24 hour computer labs, black board, digital libraries, up to the minute news sites, and online forums on any topic you can think of. This technology at our fingertips is supposed to make everything easier, and so people think that students can do more, faster. This, to an extent, can be true, but there are still too many demands and too little time. We may be more accustomed to using this technology then past generations, but the speed at which we as humans can process all of this newly available information is about the same speed as in the past 30 plus years. Until we can get an “update” like our smart phones and computers, as people, our “processing” and “output” is going to stay at relatively the same rates as before all of this technology was sparked.
The amount of information, networking, and resources available to us are continuously growing and can in themselves become a problem. The sheer volume of the information available to us can be overwhelming when trying to take it all in, process it, and use it. This makes choosing what information to use and incorporating it into our work a time consuming task. Another problem with all of this information is that anyone can create a website, contribute a post, create a blog, alter a wiki entry, etcetera. So one must be careful and take the time to sort through the multitudes of information and sources, and be intelligent enough to cut out the “junk,” so misleading or incorrect information is not used.
One other danger of all of this connectivity at the tips of our fingers (but I’m sure not the last) is that people are so easily distracted by all of the social networking, games, media sites, messaging, forums…and the list goes on. While working on your computer there is great temptation to briefly hop onto Facebook, World of War Craft, Reddit, or even CNN just to “see what’s going on,” and then, four hours later, you realize that the deadline for your paper is in an hour and you haven’t written more than a paragraph. So multitasking is not always a good thing.
Keeping in mind some of the reasons why students have so many tasks and expectations placed on them, I want to go back to passion and trading quality for quantity. The pressures and time constraints created by this massive load of both tasks and expectations leave a very narrow space for creativity and passion. This affects both students and instructors, and the work that a student is able to address in their own (limited) time for each class. It is not just the instructors that place expectations on students, it is also the school as an institution, and it expects a lot out of students and instructors alike. The pressures placed on instructors in this way affect how they must structure their courses and, in turn, affects the demands they must place on the students. To make it possible to get through all of the required material that must make up a course, it feels like learning loses its potential to spark creativity and passion, in order to make way for a more mechanical and structured learning environment that is more “time efficient.”
The amount of information, networking, and resources available to us are continuously growing and can in themselves become a problem. The sheer volume of the information available to us can be overwhelming when trying to take it all in, process it, and use it. This makes choosing what information to use and incorporating it into our work a time consuming task. Another problem with all of this information is that anyone can create a website, contribute a post, create a blog, alter a wiki entry, etcetera. So one must be careful and take the time to sort through the multitudes of information and sources, and be intelligent enough to cut out the “junk,” so misleading or incorrect information is not used.
One other danger of all of this connectivity at the tips of our fingers (but I’m sure not the last) is that people are so easily distracted by all of the social networking, games, media sites, messaging, forums…and the list goes on. While working on your computer there is great temptation to briefly hop onto Facebook, World of War Craft, Reddit, or even CNN just to “see what’s going on,” and then, four hours later, you realize that the deadline for your paper is in an hour and you haven’t written more than a paragraph. So multitasking is not always a good thing.
Keeping in mind some of the reasons why students have so many tasks and expectations placed on them, I want to go back to passion and trading quality for quantity. The pressures and time constraints created by this massive load of both tasks and expectations leave a very narrow space for creativity and passion. This affects both students and instructors, and the work that a student is able to address in their own (limited) time for each class. It is not just the instructors that place expectations on students, it is also the school as an institution, and it expects a lot out of students and instructors alike. The pressures placed on instructors in this way affect how they must structure their courses and, in turn, affects the demands they must place on the students. To make it possible to get through all of the required material that must make up a course, it feels like learning loses its potential to spark creativity and passion, in order to make way for a more mechanical and structured learning environment that is more “time efficient.”
There is an interesting connection here to Hard Times, a most interesting novel by Charles Dickens. For those of you not familiar with this piece of literature, I will quickly summarize the part related to my point. The story is set in Coketown, a fictional, industrial city in England in the mid 1800's. The school there is run very mechanically and on the principle of fact alone. The children are allowed to think and work with only facts and nothing more, as this is thought to be the most efficient and productive way to learn, in the eyes of the grown-ups in charge. Sadly this leaves the minds of the children malnourished. Those that grew up with this sort of education have little or no sense of fancy- or imagination and creativity. As one would guess, this leads to many problems in their futures Without fancy, the characters have a dull, confused and passionless existence. For us, I don't think that college has become quite that unredeemable, yet. I think that college can still be a place where we receive education of the fancy, but I also feel that things are moving in the direction of cutting out that fancy in preference of completing more tasks and fulfilling more expectations so that the college’s resume looks better. These obligations remove time and room for creativity, hindering students from truly getting involved in their work, holding them back from being sincerely proud of what they are doing. This is also where passion becomes stunted. Without the chance to delve into our work in the classes we enjoy, it becomes much harder to discover what we are passionate about and nearly impossible to pursue those passions if, somehow, we are able to find something that we are passionate about in the first place. So, as students, we must fight to maintain the passion and wonder that a good education affords us. We must fight to keep fancy in our education We also must realize that we may have to, to an extent, sacrifice some GPA points to be able to pursue our passions on our own time, with students and community groups that share our passions. We must not allow ourselves to be bullied by the expectations placed on us, and learn to work with our instructors to get the most out of the classes where our interests lie. We must work for that “well rounded” college experience and not allow ourselves to be overwhelmed or distracted by all of that technology. And finally, we must find and embrace our passions and incorporate them into our everyday college experience.