Excellence vs. Effort
Humility and Perseverance in the Classroom
___________________________________________________________________________________Mowing Fields
When I was in middle school, I wanted more than anything to have a job. Growing up in a small town, it wasn’t difficult to find work if you were 14-16, but if you were 12, that was a different story altogether. So, I decided that I would take matters into my own hands. I borrowed my parent’s lawnmower, and proceeded to push it all over the neighborhood. I would push it up and down the street, knocking on peoples’ doors to ask if they needed their yard mowed. Many politely turned me down, some agreed to let me mow their yard, and others were just annoyed that I was pushing this raucous lawnmower up and down the street.
There was one family in particular that gave me a job I was beyond excited about. They asked me if I would be willing to mow the field behind their house for $100! I thought to myself, “I can retire with this kind of money!”. So, I filled my mower up with gasoline, pushed it down the street and around the corner to the overgrown field, and started on a job that would take me 4 hours to complete. I had to refill the mower a few times and drank through at least a gallon of water, but by the time I had finished, it was the best mowing job I had ever done (and maybe still to this day). Crisp corners, an even cut, no wild grass sticking up in random places. I was quite proud of how hard I had worked. When I returned to the front door to present my landscaping masterpiece, I was shocked at their response. They responded to my outstretched hand with, “but you didn’t mow it…”. I didn’t know what to say. Were they blind? Senile? Confused? No. In fact, it turns out that I had mowed the wrong field! All of my effort was expended in the wrong direction. I worked so hard, took great care to do what I thought was the right thing, but, in the end, I wasted 4 hours mowing the neighbors field. I was furious.
At that moment, I was torn. Do I swallow my pride, accept the failure, and try and make it right? Or do I insist that because I worked so hard, I deserved my payment? In the end, I swallowed my pride and went back and mowed the correct plot of land (they ended up paying me extra, anyway), but after that day I learned a very hard and valuable lesson: Effort and excellence aren’t always the same thing.
Excellence is Born of Failure
In many cases, the reason effort and excellence are given equal treatment is an underlying fear of failure. For many of us, we are raised to believe that failure is an indicator that we aren’t good enough, strong enough, intelligent enough, etc. So, in an effort to insulate ourselves from failure, we work really hard at the tasks in front of us. We put forth a valiant effort, which is a good thing. Effort is worthy of praise, no doubt, but a job well done isn’t the same as a job done well. Doing things with excellence takes time. In fact, the belief that trying hard qualifies us for accolades, trophies, or perfect scores reveals an underlying assumption that we have nothing to learn. It reveals pride. It assumes that failure is our greatest enemy because failure reveals that we aren’t as impressive as we want to be.
Failure is the Best Teacher
In my life, the greatest educator I’ve ever known was failure. It’s precisely in the moments of failure that I’ve become most acquainted with my deep need for Jesus. In our frailty, our lack, our imperfection, our weakness, the strength of God is made perfect. The truth of the Gospel is that we don’t have to fear our weaknesses and our failures, but we can embrace them as opportunities for growth and maturity. We don’t have to be afraid of failure, because God is gracious. Too often, the fear of failure and “not-enoughness” drives us to strangle the pursuit of perfection and call it the pursuit of excellence. We hold on with a death grip to the idea that if we just try harder, we can achieve wholeness outside of Jesus. At our worst, we even try to use Jesus and vague spiritualism to achieve perfection through our own effort. From what I’ve seen, this manifests itself in two ways. We either strive for perfection to the point of exhaustion or we become entitled with the belief that because we tried hard, we did it right. In either case, fear is the motivator, not grace. In Christ, we are free to fail, free to grow, and free to try again without the pressure of perfection weighing us down.
Why Are We Really Here?
During my classroom orientations I give families a simple phrase to describe my class. I tell them, “When your students walk into my class, they arrive unfinished and leave unfinished.” The goal of education is not to produce a whole, unfinished, unblemished product. It is to produce students who are equipped to grow. Growth is painful, involves risk, and takes time. As Christians, our growth begins at birth and continues into eternity. We are made to worship the Author and Perfecter (the Finisher) of our faith. This doesn’t happen in a classroom or in 4 years. It doesn’t happen by the solitary work of our hands. Our goal as Christian educators is to equip our students with the necessary tools to grow in grace. The classroom is a practice room, not a performance hall. Too many students and parents approach the classroom as an opportunity to flex their muscles - to show how much they already know and how little they think they have to learn. Latent in this tendency, is the belief that they are already a finished product. They treat the classroom as a stage to perform upon, instead of a practice room to hone their skills. Imagine how much differently the classroom would feel if we were freed from the fear of failure? If we were released from the belief that how we perform determines the trajectory of our life and the depth of our worth? If we didn’t let intellectual prowess or scholarship money or college admissions or how we measure up next to our classmates drive every decision we make? These things aren’t unimportant, no doubt. But, too often we pretend that we are pursuing excellence when, in reality, we are idolizing security, and we sacrifice integrity, character, social development, and mental health in the process. This rears its ugly head most clearly when we fail. If failure induces debilitating fear, then excellence isn’t the goal.
The clearest picture of excellence is Christ. He is our wisdom, our prize, our aim. Christ was willing to become a man, to become subjected to humanity in every sense. He embraced the limitations of what it meant to be a human while remaining to be God in the flesh. He worked hard, pursued excellence, but remained secure in His identity as the Son of God. What’s more, he surrounded himself with broken, imperfect, stubborn failures, and he taught them what it means to live with excellence. Often they tried really hard, and still failed. If Jesus wasn’t afraid of that reality, we shouldn’t be either. His grace is always more than enough.