My freshman year of high school was, to put it concisely, a disappointment. It was when I transferred to a new school that I realized this is what school should feel like as a teenager. One thing that let me down freshman year was the science fair project. I had finally gotten a chance to design my own experiment, test it, use fancy charts and graphs on excel, and compile my research (research! I was doing my own research!) into a scientific paper. Fourteen-year-old me couldn’t be more excited at this prospect– this is where my career as a surgeon would begin.
I showed up to class about a month in with an idea for my experiment, thought up while on a drive to dance class a couple of nights before: I would test the idea of how dancing affects students’ performance on a memory-based exam. My test subjects would be middle-schoolers attending my old middle school– a place I was eager to revisit and see again. To me, my idea was perfect. It combined dance, learning, working with kids, and science, some of my favorite things in the world. To my freshman science teacher, my idea wasn’t good.
He rejected it, citing it as “hard to test” and said it was “difficult to control the variables”. Don’t get me wrong, as a sophomore science-focused student, I understand that these are valid claims that may have indeed applied to my idea. However, my issue lies in the fact that rather than work with me to refine and perfect the experiment, he tossed it aside after taking a cursory glance at it. I was fully prepared to put in the work gathering a large enough pool of test subjects (middle schoolers) and considering every aspect of the experiment to make it nearly foolproof. My teacher wasn’t prepared to put in the work.
And herein lies my claim: you don’t shut down a student’s idea. Take another, more positive example of this.
8th grade: one final mountain to climb. The obstacle? A research paper in English class about a topic chosen from a list of thirty, well-researched and developed into a thesis. Total length? A lot, at least for my nervous student mind back then. I was jumping between topics before I finally settled on something dealing with feminism and self-esteem in girls. Advertising also appealed to me, so I decided to write on how the portrayal of women in the media affects self-esteem in girls. My English teacher (bless her, she changed my life) worked with me, answered my endless questions on MLA formatting, good sources to use, how to improve my analysis of research, and tweaked my thesis until it fit perfectly. That paper is one of the things I am most proud of from my career thus far, and I look forward to writing many other papers similar to it in effort-level and passion. I learned so much from that process, and it gave me insight into what topics interest me.
Looking back, I don’t remember what I got on either of those projects. I remember the experience. It’ll sound cliche, and I’m sure many of you have heard it, but it’s about the journey, not the destination. That paper benefited me more than the science experiment ever did, and not because of a grade in the book.
I’ll leave you with this: if someone presents you with an idea, try to not shut it down. In doing so, you effectively cut off any possibility for learning or growth, and you may have killed something the person was passionate about. I’m not saying to be afraid of giving criticism; in fact, go full steam ahead with that. The goal of you, the receiver, should be to improve on the idea to help better the person, not dissuade them from pursuing something of their interest.
