Seek Excellence, Not Perfection

Embrace expectation, not hesitation

One of Oxley College’s strategies is to reimagine learning and encourage our students to engage with rigour, passion and determination in their studies. Successful learners exhibit grit (Duckworth, 2016) and it comprises both social and emotional components that help to make learners persistent. Students with higher levels of grit have been found to be more engaged in academic and peer interactions in an educational setting. Hodge et al. (2017) suggests that with greater levels of grit, students show deeper interests in learning and thus engage better in academic and non-academic interactions.

At a school assembly recently, I delivered to the Senior School Assembly a presentation that had the primary goal of inspiring students to seek excellence not perfection and embrace expectation not hesitation. Below is an extract:

Think of a time when you wanted something so desperately.  In your mind you have yearned for it for an age, it haunts you, it drives you. At moments it seems almost in your reach. But not quite.

Do you endure pain, frustration and tears over it?

Do you fight for it?

Do you steal for it?

Do you risk your life and your family’s for it?

Many of you are thinking who would go to such extremes to fulfil their one single passion.  I am also sure none of you would consider that someone would do all this and more just to learn how read. 

Are there some doubting voices amongst you? Working with such desperation to learn to read and write? What about completing an assessment task early?  Do several practice essays or Mathematics problems? –

Sounds like hard work and if you are ‘truly’ academic, shouldn’t everything appear effortless?

I put forward to you a different approach.

Why not pursue excellence instead of perfection?

Why not strive to be the best you can be in the time you have?

Why don’t you just have a go?

Like Liesel…

Liesel Meminger is the central protagonist of The Book Thief.  She is a girl who desperately wants to read as she understands words are power. In the opening pages of the book, she is on her way to her new foster family. Her own family have been accused of communism and as this is Germany during WWII under Nazi rule, this a crime punishable by being exiled to a labour camp. Which in reality was a death camp.  Relocation is the only way to save the life of Liesel and her brother. 

On the harrowing journey her little brother dies and is buried in the middle of nowhere. One of the men who is at the graveside drops a book.  This is her first theft. She is distraught and grieving but the desire to learn to read burns deep. She snatches it up, pokes it in her coat pocket, having no clue what it is about.

Later the book thief hands over her contraband to her unfailingly kind and new adoptive father Hans. He realises the book she has stolen is essentially an instruction manual about how to dig a grave.

He does not belittle her, rather he takes the book and slowly they sound out letters, she stumbles, she fails, she makes many, many mistakes.

This is no overnight success story. There are many hurdles to overcome.

She is made to sit with the kindergarten students at school because she is so far behind.

She would thrust her hand into burning flames to save a book right under the nose of the Nazis.

She discovers a library of precious books in the Mayor’s House – who is also a Nazi. She and her best friend Rudi break in to steal yet another book. While Rudi was confused at times with her obsession with books and words, he never made her feel small.

She started as the book thief without words. When the words arrived, and I quote, “she would hold them in her hands like the clouds and wring them out like the rain…” Liesel would learn everything she could and keep learning until the end.

I want you to be curious, to learn, to try, to fail. To also be a faithful friend and let those around you reach for their dreams. I want you to be like the book thief and be unrelenting, be courageous academically and just try. Make it your goal to seek excellence not perfection and embrace expectation not hesitation.

Lee McGuinness
Director of Curriculum 7-12