All Wheat and No Chaff

How the Good-Student Mindset Destroys Us, and What to Do Instead

Image credit: Yann Cœuru

The same work ethic that made us such good students becomes a form of self-destruction when applied to academic jobs in the UK humanities. There is an alternative.

Most of us hired as academics have spent a good portion of our lives being excellent students. (To be clear, this is also true of anyone who has ever applied for an academic job; I’m just focusing here on people in full-time jobs.)

By this I mean we did everything asked of us in an academic context to exceedingly high standards, and we were usually rewarded for doing so. Many of us are also anxious types who are never quite sure anything we’ve done is really good enough.

The result is what I call the good-student mindset. When we’re operating from this mindset, we

• Believe it is crucial to do everything we’re asked to do and do it well
• Assume that doing so is the path to success
• Remain hypervigilant about the quality of our work even in the face of good feedback

This mindset makes a certain sense in a context designed at least nominally to educate and train us. On the most general level, our goal as postgraduates (get a PhD) aligns with the stated goal of our PhD programmes (generate PhDs). Even when the tasks seem nonsensical or the standards harsh, it is reasonable to think that complying with them will get us where we’re trying to go, given that the entire system has ostensibly been created to convey us to exactly that destination.

Whether or not this mindset actually reflects the reality of PhD programmes is a subject for another post. For now, I want to focus on the fact that this approach is a complete mindfuck in an academic job in the humanities in UK in the present.

Consider how this plays out:

• We believe it is important to do everything we’re asked and do it well, but now we are given a workload that would take 60 hours a week to do even half-assed.
• We assume that doing everything well is the path to success, but now our tasks and targets aren’t selected to enable us to progress to our goals; instead, they are assigned by desperate department heads based on budget holes, staffing gaps, and the ever-escalating demands of admin.
• We remain hypervigilant about the quality of our work despite feedback, but now our anxiety is raised exponentially by the untenable size of our workloads. We might reasonably have expected to feel less anxious beause we’d actually landed a job. Nope. Instead we’ve augmented our longstanding worry that nothing we do is good enough with a new conviction that nothing we do is ever done enough. It’s not just that our email to our HoD was poorly worded; it’s that there are 27 more emails we haven’t even opened yet.

When we’re in this mindset, we assume that our future rides on doing any and every aspect of the job well, from chairing a subcommittee meeting to prepping a seminar discussion. But because we can’t actually do everything to the high standard we believe we must meet across the board, we are both constantly working and constantly yelling at ourselves to do more and better. No wonder we find ourselves getting ever more anxious about every detail of our job performance and ever more vigilant about how our performance is being received.

Of course, I’m not saying that our performance isn’t important in certain, specific ways if we want to stay in our post or get off probation or get promoted — but it is definitely not important in the 360-degree, granular way that the good-student mindset assumes.

But we don’t stop to consider which parts of the job actually matter in reaching our current goal, whether that is getting a promotion or getting off probation or even just keeping our jobs, because in the good-student mindset it’s the teacher who creates the hoops and measures our jumps through them. We’ve been trained to believe that someone above us in the hierarchy will tell us what is important to do, while our role is confined to doing those things and doing them well.

We never ask ourselves: what is my goal at this job right now, and what’s the shortest, easiest path to getting there that doesn’t violate my principles? Not because we couldn’t find the answer — we are researchers, after all — but because in the good-student mindset this question never occurs to us in the first place.

The wall of despair

After some years of this, most of us hit what I call the wall of despair, which is the point at which we just can’t keep doing it anymore. The wall can manifest in many forms, from health problems to the destruction of our relationships to panic attacks to clinical depression. When we hit the wall, we still believe not doing everything well means failing, but we now see no option left but to give up anyway. It is frequently a horrible moment, because from within the good-student mindset, it can feel like giving up on ourselves.

To move past the wall, we either find something else to do, or we find some alternative relationship to the job. It took me about eight years to get there, and in the end it only happened because I was so desperate to finish a book that I saw no choice but let some things go. I finally started trying to distinguish between what was crucial to do and what wasn’t, as measured by a goal I had set for myself.

In the good-student mindset, we don’t try to make this distinction, because our assumption is that we need to do everything we’re asked to a high standard. Basically, if we’re supposed to do it, then by definition it’s important. We never try to sort the wheat from the chaff, because we assume it’s all wheat and no chaff.

When I got desperate enough about my book, though, I started just consigning some parts of my job to the chaff pile anyway. Anything that contributed to my book getting done or was necessary to avoid throwing colleagues or students under the bus: wheat. Everything else: chaff. For the first time in my life, I started asking myself questions like, ‘Given that I am devoting only two hours this week to this task, what should I spend them on, and what should I just write off?’

I still believed, though, that I was only pretending some of this stuff was chaff. It wasn’t until I saw the results of this approach that I finally saw the truth: it was never fucking wheat in the first place.

On the other side of the wall, it turned out, my teaching was better. Actually, demonstrably better. A huge number of the balls I dropped just rolled quietly away, never to be returned. Others were calmly passed back to me in due course, notably without either disaster or drama. The awful yet freeing fact was, a lot of the shit I spent my time on never mattered. I had almost broken myself trying to do things that I didn’t actually need to do in order to be a good teacher or colleague.

It was both incredibly relieving and fucking infuriating, because now I could see what should have been clear all along: the good-student mindset is the ideological fuel for our exploitation as academic labour.

It leads us to wring ourselves dry in a way we never would for the mere paycheck we actually receive.

It causes us to pour our lives and hearts and minds out for institutions that treat us as a staffing cost to be reduced, and into tasks designed by bureaucrats who despise us. All the while telling ourselves — actually believing — that we should be able to do more, and better.

Fuck. That.

I want there to be a path out of the good-student mindset that isn’t made up of a thousand individual trajectories of suffering and self-judgment and defeat.

I want all of us to have the chance to start living on the other side of the wall of despair now, without ever having to hit it.

What follows is what I know about how to get there.

The triage mindset

I call the alternative to the good-student mindset the triage mindset. The first step in developing this mindset is to challenge each of the key beliefs of the good-student approach.

• Rather than believing it is crucial to do everything you’re asked to do and do it well: recognise that you cannot do everything and that probably 50% of the things you are asked to do are unimportant, and at least 25% will have zero consequences if ignored.
• Rather than assuming that doing everything well is the path to success: recognise that your goals and the goals of people assigning you work are not correlated and may even be opposed. This means you have to define your own goal in every situation and decide what it takes to meet it.
• Rather than being hypervigilant about the quality of your work however good the feedback you get: develop strategies to deal with work anxiety that do not involve trying to resolve it through more or better output. I’ve had luck with therapy, meds, coaching, and spinning classes. The key thing is to accept that your anxiety may take the form of thoughts about work, but it cannot be reduced through work.

Then, to actually put the triage mindset into practice, focus on the following steps:

1. Define your goal with relation to whatever task you have been assigned. Be specific. BE VERY FUCKING SPECIFIC.
2. Define what you think you need to do to meet this goal. Again, specifics!
3. Revisit #2 in relation to #1 and re-define #2 if it is off target.
4. Remind yourself that reverting to the good-student approach will not mitigate your anxiety and manage it otherwise.

Let’s try this with an example of something many of us encounter in our first jobs: we’ve asked to design and teach a new course in our subject area.

Here’s what we’d do in the student mindset:

• Assume everything about the class is important and must be done to a high standard — reading list, class prep, every seminar, lecture, office hour, assignment, you name it.
• Assume that meeting those standards on every possible front will constitute the class being a success
• Be hypervigilant about the quality thereof.

You’re probably as familiar with the results of this approach as I am: agonising over what to put on the reading list, hours of seminar prep and/or days spent lecture writing, constant worry about whether we will seem ‘expert enough’ to our students, pages and pages of discussion plans, anxious ruminating on anything that went ‘wrong’ after seminar. Fun times!

Here’s how the same work came to look for me once I started using the triage mindset. (Note I’m not advocating any specific goal or means of getting there; what you do will be based on your goals. This is just an example.)

1. Define my goal for the course: By the end of term, I want at least 50% of the students in each group to demonstrate engaged thinking and excitement about the material, as manifested in their participation in seminars, comments in office hours, and the work they turn in. (If this is evident in half the students, it will be present for others as well.)

2. Define how I will get there:

• Guiding principle: the fewer and more trimmed the trees, the more they’ll be able to see the forest.
• Reading list: streamlined to prioritize the clarity of its argument. Ease for me and value for them is more important than coverage outside of equity issues.
• Seminar: create two moments of synthetic thinking, where students think across a conceptual gap to arrive somewhere new to them, per seminar.
• Seminar prep: contain prep by doing it on the day of class. Identify two passages to close read and two synthetic questions. Everything else is overkill. Read material once and take good notes; in following years revisit the notes but not the material. By the time I need to re-read, it’s probably time to change the module.
• Office hours, emails, etc.: treat students as important through the quality of attention I give, not the quantity. Make sure students know why I am making the pedagogical choices I am, especially when they might be unpopular or counterintuitive.

3. Revisit #2 in relation to #1. You may find that your approach needs to be adjusted. It took me a while to see how extraneous a lot of things I thought I needed to do actually were in terms of getting the result I wanted. Stick to your goal; shift your strategies if needed.

4. Resist trying to manage anxiety through returning to the good-student mindset. I’ve now been in the triage mindset for long enough that it doesn’t make me anxious, because I’ve seen that it actually creates better results than my hypervigilance ever did.

But if you’re not there yet, just remember: if the good-student approach resolved your anxiety, it would have gone away by now. Don’t give in to the instructions your anxiety is offering you, but do treat it with self-compassion and whatever management methods work for you.

Although it may seem to cause more worry at first, the triage mindset is actually a way to reduce it in the long run, because it finally enables us to designate some things as unimportant. For example: if I start to feel anxious about something related to my course (e.g., not rereading the article I’m teaching, having to look at my notes before answering a student’s question, finding that my lecture lasts 40 minutes instead of 55), then I can ask myself: do I really think this will keep me from reaching my goal of having at least half the students manifestly learning and excited to learn?

The answer is almost always no, but the crucial thing is that I know what question to ask. I have a metric for classifying some things as simply not worth worrying about. I can let some of it be chaff.

Triage your job

You can do the same thing for your position as a whole, and I recommend you do. I would start there, actually.

1. Define your goal. You gain so much ground the moment you separate your own goal from your job as a whole. Ask yourself: what do you want? Is it to get off probation, to get your book out while remaining in your HoD’s good graces, to keep your job while seeing your partner in daylight hours once in a while?
2. Define how you will get there: Figure out what is actually required for the goals you have and downgrade everything else. Take your personal standards for being a good colleague and teacher into account. Figure out who is good at reading the department and the institution and ask them what they think matters for your specific goal. Let the balls you don’t absolutely need to catch whizz past your head. If your Head of Department’s good opinion is important to where you’re going, consider what they actually value rather than assuming they notice and care about everything you do.
3. Revisit the relationship between #2 and #1. Your goals and the institution itself will change. The line between wheat and chaff isn’t absolute or permanent; it is relative to you, your work environment, your ambitions, and your ethics and politics.
4. Resist trying to manage your anxiety by returning to the good-student mindset. This one is the biggest challenge, but it lessens over time, when you see in practice that you are actually more secure when you concentrate your energy on getting the things that matter to you most. Remember that the institution always benefits from you thinking that you should keep acting like a good student, so that you do everything asked of you to the highest standards. Your mentors may even tell you this. Don’t believe it.

Final note

There’s one more aspect to giving up the good-student mindset that I haven’t mentioned until now, which I think is an issue for a lot of us. It involves allowing our relationship to the institution to be truly adversarial rather than just aggrieved.

Although we have good reason to feel aggrieved when it comes to the institution and its demands, my sense is that a posture of grievance only perpetuates the good-student mindset in the end. There’s a subtle way in which a focus on grievance and redress operates as the flipside of trying to do everything the institution asks. Both belong to the moral universe of the student-teacher relationship, in which the teacher must at least pretend to be fair and guided by the student’s best interests, while the student tries to do everything she can to fulfill the teacher’s assignments.

This is not to say, of course, that we shouldn’t fight for better working conditions and against staff cuts and workload creep. It’s to suggest that we may find our position strengthened if we do so from the triage mindset instead.

When we leave behind the good-student mindset, we stop presenting ethical demands to the amoral machine of the institution, even if it happens to be wearing the benign face of our head of department at the time. We stop hoping for fairness and A+ marks and all the rewards we deserve, and we start scheming to meet our goals with as little cost to our sanity and souls as we can. In short, we start thinking like exploited laborers — not just on the picket line, but every time we are tempted to spend another hour on writing a lecture.

No one is going to tell us it’s enough. In fact, they’re going to tell us the opposite. But we don’t have to listen.

I’m a coach, academic, and writer. Contact me at info@janeelliottphd.com.