- Success is an abstract noun
What does success look like?
How does one measure success?
When, if ever, does success become concrete?
Who determines the value of success?
Teachers are in the business of creating environments that support student success. That’s what we do. Teachers are successful when our students succeed. Seems simple enough until you step into a classroom.
What does success look like?
Teachers want their students to succeed. Parents want their children to succeed. Students want to succeed.
To a teacher, success looks like engaged students passionate about learning. Students do well on quizzes and tests; they ask good questions, they are pleasant and enthused, and they show initiative and responsibility to do their best.
To a parent, the child is learning enough to get good grades, and the child likes school.
To a student, he or she feels competent, accepted, and confident.
Here’s the difficulty: where are the measures of success? How do you quantify passion, goodness, enthusiasm, initiative, responsibility, acceptance, and confidence?
How does one measure success?
We measure what we can: tests, quizzes, and attendance.
When, if ever, does success become concrete?
In education, we reward successful students in athletics, in academics, in citizenship, in attendance, in leadership, in music, speech, and other extra-curricular activities that participate in contests or other observable and measurable results. Graduation speeches often revolve around the idea of something like everyone is successful for graduating. It is measurable–credits, grades, and attendance.
Abraham Lincoln’s quote, “Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed is more important than any one thing,” sounds like a consolation prize to the “losers.”
Emily Dickinson’s poem gives us another take on the same idea that success is understood more fully by the “defeated’ than by the “victors.”
Success is counted sweetest/By those who ne’er succeed./To comprehend a nectar/Requires sorest need.
Not one of all the purple Host/Who took the Flag today/Can tell the definition/So clear of victory
As he defeated–dying–/On whose forbidden ear/The distant strains of triumph/Burst agonized and clear!
The war setting of the poem puts success into measurable terms: if you’re dead, you don’t succeed. The implication is that a life lived for success doesn’t provide the individual with the wisdom that is earned by someone who is defeated. And I think there is a suggestion of envy for the victor even though the “dying” has a deeper understanding of success than the victor.
Who determines the value of success?
The individual chooses what is worth pursuing. The victor, ironically, understands success less well than the defeated.
I would never suggest that all recognitions of concrete success are without value. I would suggest, however, that success in and of itself is less fulfilling than the effort to pursue what provides the pursuer confidence, happiness, and wisdom.
Pursuing recognition builds stamina, character, and purpose. Pursuing success, however, requires the courage to risk everything, for as Lincoln and Dickinson remind us, winning is not the most important thing.
