“Disappointment, when it involves neither shame nor loss, is as good as success; for it supplies as many images to the mind, and as many topics to the tongue.” Samuel Johnson
I had very low expectations of this weekend. The last few weeks have left me a bit punch drunk and I was looking forward to doing nothing much. In fact, I’ve been very pleasantly surprised and, all in all, I’ve had a great weekend: meeting friends, spending time with my youngest daughter, going out as a family for a meal, and going on a long hike this afternoon. I’ve heard it said before that expectations are resentments under construction and that expecting little can be a very rewarding way to live.
It struck me that this is a very different narrative to the one we enact in schools. I’ve just finished rereading David Mitchell’s novel Black Swan Green about a boy, very much like myself, growing up in the 80s. At one point in the story, Jason, the narrator meets an elderly Belgian woman who sets him the task of translating the first chapter of Alain Fornier’s classic novel Le Grand Meaulnes. This is a task way beyond anything Jason has ever had to tackle in French lessons at school and it seems impossibly difficult. How could anyone reasonably expect a thirteen-year-old boy to translate such a rich, complex work of literature? But because there is a clear – if unreasonable – expectation that he should be able to do this, he does it. And what’s more, he finds he enjoys it.
More and more we talk about the importance and power of high expectations – after all, no one rises to a low expectation. When we have very high expectations of students we will inevitably suffer disappointment. Every year I would teach my students in the expectation that they would get an A grade and very often I – and they – would be disappointed with the grade they actually got. But on the whole, even if they didn’t achieve as I expected they could, they tended to do better than they believed possible. If you aim at the bull’s eye you’re a lot likelier to get a dart on the board.
Being pleasantly surprised by our students is lovely. It’s always terrific when someone exceeds our expectations, but why did we not have the expectation that they would be their very best anyway? I want to make a case for the value of disappointment. Usually, disappointment is associated with helplessness and hopelessness.
I want to advocate for hopeful disappointment. Not a general sense of dissatisfaction, but a tactical, thoughtful and planned intervention to prevent students being content with ‘good enough’. I want to suggest that as teachers we should set our faces against mediocrity and lack of effort. Ron Berger talks about work either being excellent or unfinished. This is, I think, a powerful way of framing the discussion: If your work isn’t excellent then it’s not finished. Crack on. Of course we can (and possibly should) have a sliding scale of excellence. We can acknowledge when a child has sweated blood but hasn’t met the standard of other students who’ve turned out passable work without effort. I want to urge teachers to be foster an attitude of disappointment in the efforts of our students, not so much their outcomes. And not because we should seek to make students feel bad about the efforts they’ve undertaken but because we expect miracles.
None of this is to urge a lack of compassion. Of course we need to be sensitive to children’s prior experiences of failure; we need to inspire and instill the self-belief required to unpick the well-worn internal narratives that tell them I can’t; we need to be waiting, supportive, but disappointed and tell them, you can. Maybe we’d do better sometimes to conceal our instinct for kindness and to tell them, never mind. Maybe they‘d do better if we shook our heads and said, I think you can do better than this.
Being disappointed all the time is probably a terrible way to live but could be a great way to teach. If you’re not disappointed in your students, maybe, just maybe, your standards are too low.
Great post. I think as teachers the feeling of being constantly dissatisfied with what we provide spurs us on to be even better (as long as we don’t let guilt and feelings of failure drag us down). Difficult balance, but we need to model it as well as promote it with pupils.
This worries me somewhat – I see what you’re getting at and I see in many cases this could be successful at getting students to achieve their very best in the shirt time we have them. But there are many children out there who are doing themselves sounds constable mental health damage by pouring themselves under enormous pressure constantly, partly due to this atmosphere pervading schools. My daughter is highly perfectionist, and spent many weeks crying daily over what would happen if she “failed her SATs” despite me nightly telling her that it didn’t matter. I have no doubt at all she will be far worse in five years time – I work with her daily on stress management and we are part way through a diagnosis of aspergers – but as a teacher I see many examples daily. I put myself under similar pressure and ended up with chronic fatigue through my entire twenties that was crippling. We have problems with a hugely high depression rate and massive mental health crisis in our youth – I can’t see that the dirty of pressure that this attitude would put on them could possibly help.
I must say I follow your blog avidly and find out hugely helpful – I rarely find myself in disagreement – but this is an issue very much in my heart – I hope you’ll see how much damage this could cause.
Perfectionism is a blight. It’s result is often to cause students to achieve nothing as they see what they are able to produce as worthless. Obviously this is to be avoided at all costs. This is where our disappointed hero enters: “This perfectionism is jolly disappointing. I have high expectation of what you can achieve and your attitude is getting in the way!” Struggling, making mistakes and learning from them are all crucial – if teachers are communicating to students that they mustn’t make errors then they have very low expectations – the only way to avoid mistakes is not to do anything difficult.
I’m talking about something different: a refusal to be content with lack of effort.
Yes, and I think it is crucial this point is made very clear! But I also worry about the effort children are prepared to put in. I realised early on that on order to do my very best I could, and therefore should, put in 100% all the time. So I did. Relentlessly. For years. Through A levels and uni, and beyond, until I collapsed with the effort, totally burned out at 21. I see young teachers going the same way daily. I see young students suffering the same path – to put 100% effort in no matter what the cost! It’s simply not sustainable in the long run if you want people to lead happy productive lives long term. Yes, it might up our results – but its incredibly short term gain.
I have to say I have the conversation daily with students that learning is about making mistakes – that if they haven’t got stuck, failed, struggled and messed up in my lessons then I have failed and they’ve learned nothing – partly something you have given me the confidence to say!
It is a crucial question: how do we ask more from a child, or anyone, without crushing them.
Disappointment is a big word that is heavy with judgment. At least that was my childhood experience and belief. But we grow up, look around, and discover there are different ways to use words and to be. The word itself doesn’t change but the context can.
Angela Duckworth spoke about true grit at The Times Education Festival this year. In a discussion afterwards this same question was voiced and her response was swift: she often tells her child when she is disappointed with her.
It seems disappointment is rather like Voldemort: the power rests not in the word but in the dynamic between the person saying it and the person receiving it.
Duckworth described two lines crossing in the middle with the horizontal indicating cold to warm, the vertical indicating undemanding to demanding. When a person demands that they expected more with warmth (unconditional/loving kindness) the child feels secure and the word disappointment acts as an encouragement to do better; when the person is demanding and cold (conditional) the child is left to try again feeling insecure, fearing they will disappoint again and lose the support.
A teacher using false growth mindset, irrespective of using the word disappointment, is likely to paralyse a perfectionist or sensitive child into a state of learned helplessness by encouraging failure then censuring it. A growth mindset delivered with warmth will encourage even the perfectionist to explore just what they can do, and disappointment becomes just another way of saying we both know you have it in you to try again and do better.
Thanks ephemeral – this is a useful development of what I was trying to communicate. The warmth with which we express our disappointment is worth considering, as is the issue of context.
I used to tell the children that I always aimed for an A or the best I could. If I didn’t get it I realised that I would still be better off than if I had aimed low. So you get a B or a C (and I did for some GCSEs and one A-Levels) BUT what I got was the prize I really wanted in both cases – a place at the best college and the chance to do my A-Levels, and the chance to go to university. Both the OH and I applied for funding to studying beyond degree level and didn’t get the scholarships we wanted at first BUT got alternative ones from the departments we wanted to study at. I 100% agree with what you are saying b/c you can learn from the disappointment of not getting something but to not try at all leads to much resentment, bitterness, excuses for oneself. I can live with all the minor disappointments I’ve had now and disappointment itself is a spur for reflection. Do I carry on? Do I improve? Do I need to try a different course?
Ok, having doesn’t a day in school I have used this a number of times – I think your are right in the vast majority of cases. Most students need to be told if they are not truly putting in one hundred percent, and in our culture of spoon feeding that is almost all. They do need to be taught grit, which is about failure and struggle etc…
I do think there are some (I’m the mum of one) who do seriously put in one hundred percent all the time, for whom disappointing a teacher is terrible. My daughter can fail, because we have worked hard on her accepting this as necessary for learning, but if she knows I’ve noticed, or a teacher makes comment, she can be brought to her knees for hours! Is getting aspergers diagnosis though! I think we need to be very sensitive about who we use this with.
On general though, on reflection on school – this is something I will use!
This is a very interesting exploration of the care needed in our use of expectations and emotional feedback. As you say, when you cultivate expectations it can be very tempting to seek to relieve a student’s disappointment when they fail to meet these. Developing the capacity to experience the disappointment of failure and yet setting high expectations again for next time is surely a key component of true resilience. It strikes me that disappointment is quite like grief, it just needs to be felt.
There are echoes here of Dweck’s piece “Caution – Praise can be dangerous” (1999) in which she explored the hazards of what she called the ‘high-self esteem movement’. Praising a student who has failed to meet their goals risks communicating that you never really believed they could achieve them.
This is a subtle art: acknowledging their disappointment and how uncomfortable that feels as being part of learning, valuing their effort, helping them recognise what they have achieved and what they did to enable this, but also what they could do to improve next time are all part of the skills of a teacher who really knows their students.
I agree with your sentiment ‘that disappointment is quite like grief, it just needs to be felt’ – and released. Hopefully managers and policy-makers will come to recognise and value the ‘subtle art’ of being a teacher, and facilitate this in schools.