I made a realization today.
...
I was destined for greatness.
You would think that that statement would be accompanied by a smug recollection of all the times baby Allie completed a Rubik's cube or answered the Double Jeopardy question correctly. But no. I say that with a bit of disappointment in my voice, a sad lag in my typing.
For that, there's a two-fold reason:
First of all, I've grown very accustomed to the idea of being a Super Latina, growing up with nothing, doing my best, beating the odds, and striving for many years, until finally reaching my goal of Yale. I was just one of many like me, whether that be a Latina, or a person of color, or growing up in a single-parent household, or being told too many times that mommy couldn't afford that, or being the first of my family to make it to college. I imagine myself coming back to New York, to Queens, to Woodside, and being like, "You see?? You can do it, too!" In a way, I've already started, getting on every younger person I know when they doubt anything about their future. Semilla de la Excellencia Colombiana? A way for me to tell the entire Colombian community of NY that college, and in particular an Ivy League education, is feasible, doable, within reach! It's always been, "If I can do it, so can you."
But what if the playing field wasn't level to begin with? It's not that I discovered I've actually been wealthy this entire time (pfft). I sat down to debate with Shanah over what makes US different from all the other people in the same exact situations. Why we're where we are in life. And it came down to DRIVE. So now you're saying, of course, that's obvious. But I've always supposed you can will yourself to care about things. You can make yourself attribute importance to certain things because you're looking ahead and know you have to get stuff done in order to get where you want to be. You can develop habits of excellence if prompted by yourself or others.
But the difference between me and them, "success" and not, is the strength of the drive and willpower we're born with. Imagine a scale, 1 to 10. The average person, be they rich or poor, White or Brown, settles in at a 5. You, my friends, are most likely 10's. There are PLENTY of people with (a) parent(s) just as supportive as I had, with the same opportunities (or, rather, lack thereof) that I had, growing up in the same surroundings, being influenced by the same media and being fed the same ideas, that are just not where I am right now. Why? I am a 10, and looking back, I've always been a 10.
Score one for genetics in this never-ending battle of Nature VS Nurture.
Which brings me back to: I was destined for greatness. I feel like this takes away from my accomplishments slightly. I feel like the rich kid whose daddy always gets her out of trouble, who knows that no matter how many screw-ups she makes, she's destined to own daddy's company one day and marry a rich lawyer and buy the penthouse in the city (MY penthouse). I loved the sense of battling it out against the world, this injust world where we don't hear about Yale graduates unless they're the type of powerful family that later controls the entire country, much less Latina Yale graduates. I loved working ridiculously hard, knowing that my goal was to be the first Latina _______, knowing that it could, probability-wise, be ANY of us, but that I was gonna personally make sure that it would be me. But if I entered this world, ready and willing to fight, the number 10 unknowingly prominent on my list of traits, then I didn't start off like everyone else. And if everyone else starts off and remains a 5, a 3, or even a 1, then how can I relate?
Which leads me to point number two. How can I convince other people to "follow in my footsteps" if I KNOW that I have something that they might possibly never be able to cultivate? How can I convince a 4 they can become a 10? Should I even be trying to do that? Or am I expecting too much of people that don't even aspire to the things we do? Many are content with different, though not necessarily inferior, embodiments of success. I want to push students to continue, to aim high, to dream in the possibility of greatness, of my idea of success. But if they're not an upper-scale number already...
How do I make someone care?
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I really liked reading this post, Allie. I've definitely thought about it before, and yes, it was frustrating to think that even if you tell someone that Yale is the best place in the whole world and that they should aspire to get there, the reality is that, like you mentioned, not everyone has the same ideas of success that you/we do.
I remember that in high school, we had a college prep club, and I was supposed to be helping kids figure out college stuff and applying and all that jazz. Inevitably, my knowledge was pretty limited to what I was dealing with, which was the common app, application supplements, all the nuances of the application process as it applied to top-tier schools. I felt awful because I didn't know how to help kids who just wanted to know how community college worked, kids who sought technical programs, basically anything outside of what I knew.
It seems so simple to us that everyone should just want the same things and work just as hard to get there, inherently knowing that that's the best way to make a difference/be successful (because that's what we're told and made to believe).
But like you said, there are many, many definitions of success. And at that time, I didn't know how to relate, how to guide people who didn't share my aspirations in terms of what colleges they wanted to attend...and so I really couldn't do much to help them. And looking back, it really disappoints me.
I keep coming back to your question of how to convince someone with less drive to strive higher, try harder, want more...and I can't decide what I think. It's tricky.
On the one hand, I'm tempted to say, just accept their idea of success (if it's appropriate...but then how do you judge that, should you even judge that?) and encourage them to be the best they can be at whatever they want to do.
But then I think what you're referring to are kids who just want to settle with mediocrity, resigning themselves at the first sign of potential failure. And there I would agree...that's a problem.
But then there's the possibility that perhaps they're not driven to do things that society pushes them to do because they just haven't found something they're passionate about. It's going back to the idea of multiple intelligences, about how we all have different inherent skills, and that sometimes they just don't match with society's traditional image of who's smart and who's not.
So maybe our task lies in helping them find that passion, helping them tap into whatever their skills are and whatever type of intelligence they possess.
We can't deny that education remains the #1 most important factor in any kind of success, but I feel like there are so many factors influencing a child's poor performance in school, from lack of support to low self-esteem to never having teachers who believed in them or expected much from them in the first place. And that's a whole 'nother can of worms. Or whatever that phrase is. So though our priority should be encouraging the pursuit of education, the ways we go about that (or the way society, or public schools, go about that) need to adapt, I think.
So I suppose on an individual level, though we can't necessarily expect people to follow in our footsteps, we can work to help them determine their definition of success, open their minds to the different opportunities out there, maybe push them to stretch their limits and change that definition if theirs is clouded by fear and self-doubt, and just focus on baby steps at first. Maybe succeeding at a little goal, something we might consider "not challenging themselves" could give someone the confidence they need to try something harder next time, to be a little riskier and try for something they want more. But it takes high expectations on our part (or on the part of whoever is supporting them) because inevitably kids learn to see themselves through the eyes of others; if no one expects much of them, why should they expect much of themselves?
You can tell someone that "they can do anything they set their minds to," and for some people that's enough, probably because they've been successful at things in the past. But for someone who maybe has never really experienced that, our little encouraging phrase just sounds silly, idealistic, and ultimately useless in how they plan their lives.
So this comment is probably longer than your entire blog post by now, and so I'll stop. Maybe I was completely off the mark as to what you were thinking about/asking about, because I framed my response with kids I know in mind (and obviously we know different kids).
But I really want to discuss this more at some point, because truthfully I haven't done all that I could be doing to help the "next generation" of kids, and figuring out ways to do that, ways that actually work, is something that I think would be really valuable and worthwhile.
Yay! =)
<333
nico
uhm..sabes alguna vez hablaba con julián de lo mismo o algo parecido.. ya que en Colombia la situación es económicamente mas díficil para muchas personas (tu eres millonaria ante los ojos de millones de mis compatriotas!!!) pero a la misma vez la educación de mayor calidad aquí es pública y es baratísima!!, si aquellos que hoy hacen quedar mal al país matando, secuestrando y demás, hubiesen tenido una guía o simplemente alguien d EJEMPLO (esa es en mi pinión la respuesta a tu pregunta) que les mostrara que si se puede.. que les cambiara el pensamiento pesimista y mediocre, y llenara de esperanzas sus sueños...nuestro país estaría en paz...porque en vez de hacer dañoo decidirían a toda costa alcanzar sus sueños.
Me dejaste pensando con eso y te juro que mucha veces lo he pensado..... es como dice mi entrenador "no podemos evitar pensar, entonces si tenemos que hacerlo.. pues pensemos siempre en lo mejor"
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