In Praise of the “B” Student
In my office I have painted on my wall the words to the iconic Apple “Think Different” ad. If you are unfamiliar with it, I highly suggest stopping everything you are doing and watching it right now. You’ll have a better understanding if you do, why I am going to praise the “B” (and often times, “C”) student.
Let me be clear, first off, I am looking to praise the “B” student who could easily be an “A” student. Many of you have probably heard the same thing I heard growing up, “Risa needs to work harder to live up to her potential.” I assume this meant, “Risa is not trying hard enough to meet the SCHOOL’s expectations.” And, I didn’t. I didn’t feel like I fit in. I’m no Einstein, but Albert felt this way, too. I hated the conceptual change I noticed when I had to move with my family from the highly progressive relatively unstructured elementary school I attended in Chicago to the highly repressive and rigid school I went on to attend in Atlanta. It’s not that I wasn’t wanting to engage, I just didn’t want to engage the way THEY wanted me to engage.
I see this same attitude in many of my students. My university is well respected and the students who attend are very well-prepared. But, I can tell the ones who could have gone to an even better school if they had “applied themselves” a bit more. Once a classroom atmosphere of student empowerment is clearly established, I can see how they think. I can tell quite clearly which ones “think different” and it’s amazing to watch their wheels turn as they become comfortable expressing thoughts that diverge from the mainstream. I have a young man in my Introduction to Psychology course right now who fits this mold. During one class-led discussion, he fearlessly positioned himself in the center of the student circle and challenged the other students’ perceptions to stimulate thoughtful discussion.
Sometimes, I’m convinced many “B” students aren’t “A” students because they’re frustrated, withholding their thoughts and perspectives because they’re aggravated and/or resentful over the way they’ve been taught, or they’ve grasped the concepts and are now mulling over an assortment of connections the material is forming in their head. Whatever the case, I think they are most often the ones who think different. They also think differently. Their brains are less constrained to the left hemisphere and they are busy developing the horizontal segment of the “T” rather than the vertical segment.
When these students are unleashed in a comfortable academic atmosphere, one can truly bear witness to the connections being made in their heads. It is a wondrous thing to behold. It’s full of, “But why couldn’t you do it this way?” and “Yeah, but why?” and “Oh my God! That reminds me of this thing I saw on TV the other night where…” It’s these students who think creatively. And, it’s years of pent up frustration pouring out in my classroom that has them physically leaping out of their chairs in excitement over a question they just HAVE to ask or a connection they’ve just astonished themselves over making.
So, as a professor, I can honestly say, there are no students more rewarding to me than the “B” (and sometimes “C”) students who find themselves unrestrained, invulnerable, and excited to make quirky responses that might appear completely off-topic if you didn’t know their thoughts were like pinballs hitting so many disjointed neurons to light up the board in astonishing ways.
By the way, Steve Jobs’s high school gpa was 2.65.