by Mike Davis, Ph.D.
Head of School

Recently, I was in a group golf lesson with my family, and the instructor, a very wry, yet intense French golf pro, had the students perform a series of challenges related to putting. We all participated in a game in which we had to putt the golf ball a certain distance. If we were successful in getting the ball near the hole, each time we would start from a point farther and farther away from the hole.

One student (not I) was getting closer and closer to the end goal. When this student got to the final challenge, the instructor ordered everyone to stop and to watch this student attempt a final challenge. She said, “It’s one thing to be successful on your own; it’s another to do so when people are watching.” Of course, this student blew the putt. The teacher continued: “Living with pressure is essential to the game of golf. You can’t truly practice without somehow simulating the pressure that one feels in a real competition.”

 

I go back and forth all time about the pros and cons of “pressure” upon student performance. For me, pressure has sometimes been a good thing. Facing challenges, I’ve dug deep to try to do my best. The best learning experiences for me have come at times when there was a lot at stake. Whether it was working on my dissertation with a demanding advisor at Vanderbilt, or climbing my first 5.10 on lead, I have found that performing when the stakes are relatively high has given me a certain amount of satisfaction.

 

In the wonderful documentary on the late George Harrison of the Beatles entitled Living in the Material World, the great race car driver Jackie Stewart talks about the transformative effects of pressure. He describes a scene from his life on the racetrack. “You are going very fast. You are going at the absolute limit of the car’s tires and its suspension and you, yourself are right on the edge of your limit — taking it to the finest point. When that happens, your senses are so strong. And, in my case, I relate it to a real experience, when I came to a corner and before I got to the corner, I smelled grass. My senses were so sharp, so exaggerated, that a car had gone off the road in front of me out of my sight; my senses told me that something was wrong.”

Stewart never saw the crash, but picked up the smell of grass and knew he had to turn to avoid a crash only milliseconds away. Stewart, who was a great friend of George Harrison, connects his own heightened sense of awareness when performing under pressure with Harrison’s understanding of music as a high-performing and skilled guitar player. When someone performs at a high level under pressure, they are going beyond what is typically humanly possible. It is always inspiring.

 

On the other hand, I’ve seen the negative effects of too much pressure on a student’s well-being and mental health. (It takes years and years to develop the skill set of Jackie Stewart or George Harrison as well as the coping mechanisms to put pressure to good use.) We all know stories from our youth and our own experience of times that “pressure” from parents, peers, teachers, and even ourselves can be almost unbearable. I remember my own parents somehow convincing themselves that they “never” put pressure on my brothers and me about grades, but I distinctly remember them telling me what grades were unacceptable and would therefore result in a ban from other activities.

 

Today, we sometimes see unhealthy obsessions with grades at the expense of accepting and managing the complicated nature of the learning process. And despite the intense pressure, we read frequent news reports of how our education system is ranked unfavorably with that of other nations.

 

Politicians move to introduce new reforms to make U.S. students more “competitive” — which only leads to changes that increase pressure rather than inspiring true learning. Despite the obvious dangers of placing too much pressure on students, our system is only adding more.

 

So what are we to do about it?

 

I think parents and teachers must be mindful about the kind of pressure we place on students. We approach learning from a student-centered perspective; yet, the nature of schools is stuck in a 20th century paradigm. (We are, of course, trying to change that at CA.) For parents, it is important to remember the many high-functioning leaders who struggled their way through school.

 

For teachers, we need to redefine rigor and rethink how we approach our craft. Schools must acknowledge the multi-dimensional lives of students and find ways during the day to maximize learning. If we have an adult friend who works from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., as many of our students do at school, and then goes home to 3-4 hours of more work (as can exist in a strong academic program like our Upper School), we would tell that friend they need to take better care of themselves.

I am reading Performing Under Pressure: The Science of Doing Your Best When it Matters Most by Hendrie Weisinger and JP Pawliw-Fry. Their study of the impact of pressure on performance is based upon intensive research. They find that “pressure is the enemy of success: It undermines performance and helps us fail.”

 

Their findings dovetail with recent scholarship by the American Psychological Association, which finds that, “Children may perform better in school and feel more confident about themselves when they are told that failure is a normal part of learning, rather than being pressured to succeed at all costs.” I give lots of talks to parents when I talk about the value of failure and everyone nods their heads in agreement. It all sounds good in the abstract, until your child actually experiences a failure. We tend to lose sight that a child’s failure or struggles are typically short-lived and often provide a valuable learning opportunity that can be transformative.

 

Weisinger and Pawliw-Fry point out that sometimes our efforts to induce high performance can actually lead to more stress: “We have found that many conventional tools, such as incentives or praising results, used to motivate ourselves and others, and improve organizational effectiveness, are actually pressure traps.”

 

An article in The Huffington Post titled, “College Students and their Helicopter Parents: A Recipe for Stress,” describes how parents who attempt to “micromanage their child’s success” are not stopping at high school graduation, but are following their children to college. The results are bad: “More and more university students are feeling anxious, depressed, and dissatisfied than ever before.” Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Mary Washington, Holly Schiffrin, observes, “Parents are sending an unintentional message to children that they are not competent” when they try to manage every facet of their child’s life. A study led by Schiffrin concludes that happiness can be predicated on three elements in people’s lives: “feeling autonomous, competent, and connected to other people.” The article encourages parents to love and respect their children and allow them to rise and fall on their own.

 

Weisinger and Pawliw-Fry note that pressure is real and is something that all humans have to confront. They find that people who perform well in pressure situations have the following attributes: “confidence, optimism, tenacity, and enthusiasm.” So, how do we teach this to our children? We need to help our children be resilient by teaching them to cope with hardship and see that most setbacks are only temporary.

 

If we think about the “greatest generation” of Americans — the WWII generation — that truly made our nation great, we know that they spent their childhoods allowed to be children. They had free time. They explored nature. They weren’t overscheduled. Their parents tended to not be overly anxious in their parenting, despite the fact that many were living in poverty during the Great Depression. There is a lesson here somewhere for all of us.