{"id":40,"date":"2020-02-23T12:58:06","date_gmt":"2020-02-23T20:58:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/moleculesatmidnight.com\/?p=40"},"modified":"2020-09-05T15:41:49","modified_gmt":"2020-09-05T22:41:49","slug":"dont-shut-down-a-students-idea","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/moleculesatmidnight.com\/?p=40","title":{"rendered":"Don’t Shut Down a Student’s Idea"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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The main obstacle between an idea and success is “no”<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

My freshman year of high school was, to put it concisely, a disappointment.\u00a0 It was when I transferred to a new school that I realized this<\/em> is what school should feel like as a teenager.\u00a0 One thing that let me down freshman year was the science fair project.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Fourteen-year-old me couldn\u2019t be more excited at this prospect\u2013 this is where my career as a surgeon would begin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019 performance on a memory-based exam.\u00a0 My test subjects would be middle-schoolers attending my old middle school\u2013 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.\u00a0 To my freshman science teacher, my idea wasn\u2019t good.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\tHe rejected it, citing it as \u201chard to test\u201d and said it was \u201cdifficult to control the variables\u201d.  Don\u2019t 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\u2019t prepared to put in the work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\tAnd herein lies my claim: you don\u2019t shut down a student\u2019s idea.  Take another, more positive example of this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

8th grade: one final mountain to climb.\u00a0 The obstacle? A research paper in English class about a topic chosen from a list of thirty, well-researched and developed into a thesis.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Looking back, I don\u2019t remember what I got on either of those projects.  I remember the experience. It\u2019ll sound cliche, and I\u2019m sure many of you have heard it, but it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ll leave you with this: if someone presents you with an idea, try to not shut it down.\u00a0 In doing so, you effectively cut off any possibility for learning or growth, and you may have killed something the person was passionate about.\u00a0 I\u2019m 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.
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My freshman year of high school was, to put it concisely, a disappointment.\u00a0 It was when I transferred to a new school that I realized this is what school should…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,45],"tags":[48,50,28],"class_list":["post-40","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal","category-school","tag-opinion","tag-personal","tag-school"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/moleculesatmidnight.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/moleculesatmidnight.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/moleculesatmidnight.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/moleculesatmidnight.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/moleculesatmidnight.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=40"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/moleculesatmidnight.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/moleculesatmidnight.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=40"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/moleculesatmidnight.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=40"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/moleculesatmidnight.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=40"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}