What does success mean?
A teacher models what it means to productively deconstruct the word while preserving its core motivational value.
Success is desirable. It’s often presented as a word with a stable, straightforward meaning, and a versatile one, applicable across and between many different environments. The OED helps us track the word’s meaning, which has evolved since its first mentions in the sixteenth century; notably, it’s a broad definition, and basically summed up, they say that success means “the achievement of something.” Schools, and the students within them, show us that that’s an unproductively vague definition, and that it’s worth always defining the term more closely.
I can hear my own father, along with parents of a lot of my students, responding right back to me: but success does have a definition, and that definition does matter! I don’t disagree with this idea. If success can, as teachers often say, have myriad different definitions, then it ceases to have a standardized signification at all. Losing its stable center, then, the word becomes societally unproductive word altogether. Given the abundance of research on the value of mastery experiences (success that students can recognize as such) in motivation, along with the instinct that most people seem to care about being somehow successful, such total erosion of the idea’s meaning seems unuseful. Inviting in the idea of multiple successes, though, doesn’t have to mean reducing the term to some nebulous label. Specifically, it’s value to speak of more specific versions of success, and to frame conversations determining success around those more specific subcategories. By naming the thing we’re talking about - workplace or academic success, relational success, success in overcoming obstacles, success in developing persistence - we can define the boundaries of what actually matters in a conversation. We can put the idea of success to use constructively and productively, for the good of our kids and one another.
It’s my suspicion that people talk about “success” around me, an educator, more often than they talk about it in the world around me. Students’ parents tell me all the time that they want to see their child successful, and their students say they want to be successful in class, and faculty meetings talk about measures of and barriers to student success, constantly; it feels like a specific frenzy. But when I visit Linkedin, or a bar anywhere in Manhattan, or talk to my family, I realize that everyone’s talking about success: whether a business is successful or whether a law could be successful; whether they’ve stuck to their fitness regimen or whether they’ve found their lost keys. Frequent use makes success seem ubiquitous, even expected, when success, when elusive, is actually complicated and difficult. Because success seems common to gain, then, it also seems universally good. This heightens the problem of the word “success”: treating it as simple in both meaning and attainment traps anyone who seeks it in a negative and ironically purposeless cycle.
My interview with Abby Cacho really drew my attention to the traps and opportunities that thinking about success can offer us, not only as students but also as adults. Her description of the two most meaningful teachers in her life (both of whom have been in her life for over a decade, now) in many ways centers on the idea that success is valuable motivation, but only if it’s interrogated and the goal specified. Mr. Weeks, her first mentor at KIPP Academy, worked and works to make sure that she “[felt and feels] successful.” The idea of making a person feel successful gives me pause, at first, because success is treated as a thing to be achieved. If success can be felt, though, perhaps achieving it requires less effort or striving and more of an effort of the mind to shift perspective, to see and define what’s already there for the success that it represents.
This sounds very wishy-washy, I know. Doesn’t viewing success as a frame of mind also devalue success? If, as Abby says, this wonderful teacher “allowed [her] to define and redefine [her] definition of success” across “Plans A, B, C, and D,” then he’s also allowed her to let go of past definitions of success. To let a student blossom so many different ideas of success verges on permitting them to take the dangerous route I described earlier: to name so many ideas of success that “success” itself has no meaning and is detached from the socially-derived idea of success (which is, though dangerous and corrupting, also something students and people need to be introduced to in schools). But what’s critical is that Abby worked through this idea of success with a person who helped her to stay oriented, who placed enormous value in the achievement and formulation of success, who learned her definitions and worked with her to work toward them. Though Mr. Weeks doesn’t hold Abby or require her to hold herself “to one standard of success,” to take the “one path” to “corporate America,” he never allowed that fragmenting and differentiation of different successes to erode her belief that success, the broad idea that encompassed every definition she built for herself, could motivate and matter. He told her she’d “succeed anywhere,” and, by staying on her wavelength of what kind of success she’s looking at, he actually fosters her ability to achieve it.
To work as a team around a student, then, and foster the desire for and and achievement of successes, teachers and parents and administrators and cultural scions need both to introduce students to multiple pictures of success and foster critical conversations that name what we’re talking about and working toward and when. Adults need to treat one another the same way, circumventing simplistic and vague language around success and supplanting it with speech patterns that can mold more constructive thought patterns. That’s the way to give form to the amorphous thing we’re supposed to want - to give it life, action; to turn it from a thing to be had into a feeling to enter into. Once we know what we’re looking for, we’re able to design tangible steps to achieve it.
As I reflect on my interview with Abby, I think about her prediction that the future of schools will involve “[teaching] the students we have in front of us, not the ones we wish they were or previously had.” This is always the hardest mindset to explain to a frustrated parent, and I’m often asked to defend it. But I believe in meeting kids where they are, and I believe the same (if not moreso) for the adults who I care about and encounter around me. Relationships, we learn through Abby and Mr. Weeks, can help us focus on the success we’ve worked to define and achieve, rather than aimless work to enumerate the successes we’ve been told we’ve achieved.