At the beginning of this year, I tried my hardest and earned a C in Dr. Feng’s infamous Precalculus Honors class. What else is new? But it still hurt to think that my best was no longer enough. And that’s dangerous — to have a sense of self so focused on performance that it wavers every time a point is deducted.
Someone else read this column before you did.
His verdict? Smart, but not quite right. He went to a school like ours. Felt the same pressure, made the same complaints. But when he looks back now, he’s grateful — not despite what the school tried to do, but because of it. The formation worked, he said. Even when it didn’t feel like it was working.
I fired back. Here, we learn the vocabulary about character. 10th grade English is dedicated to exploring it. We memorize the definitions, we give the right answers in the right rooms, sometimes verbatim. But it’ll never become real. It won’t leave campus when we eventually do.
I’ve been stuck on what he said next ever since.
You’re probably already living it. You just can’t see it.
Maybe that’s the thing about being 17. The processes of growing and of reflecting are happening at the same time, and they get in each other’s way — especially when we’re so focused on what the end goal is.
There’s a word for what he was talking about. Not instruction. Formation.
Formation doesn’t work like instruction. It’s slow and untestable. It happens in the background, through friction and repetition and failure, unannounced. You don’t feel it taking hold. You just eventually notice that you’re different, or someone who knew you before tells you that you are.
The problem is that a school built around achievement doesn’t have a great language for something that can barely be defined. But it tries anyway. It gives formation a map. It turns integrity into a vocabulary word to be memorized by Friday and courage into a chapel talk given last Wednesday and then hopes that students can perform the concept and truly inhabit it. Still, performance and inhabiting aren’t always as far apart as they seem. That’s what I keep coming back to.
In Spanish, we learned the phrase “toma agua bendita y acabarás creyendo.” I won’t translate it for you or explain why we were learning about the French philosopher Blas Pascal in Spanish class, but we were. It gets at the idea that if you practice something for long enough, even without fully meaning it, something shifts somewhere in that repetition.
The athlete who practices a movement until it becomes muscle memory isn’t faking the movement. The musician who plays scales until they’re drumming them out on the Harkness table during APUSH isn’t pretending to be a musician. Character development might work the same way.
Maybe you say the right things enough times in enough high-pressure moments that it stops being something that you just say.
Maybe you start to believe. Even unconsciously. I’m not sure I completely believe that. It feels too convenient, too much like a justification for a system I want to blame. But I can’t dismiss it either.
But when I got that C, I stopped and asked a question.
And, whether I like it or not, the fact that I asked who I was without the grade didn’t come from nowhere.
