I just stole a moment from grading the stack of research papers and semester exams to watch the first few minutes of the TED Talk embedded below on “The Art of the Interview.” The speaker discusses the importance of having interviewees  who have not only intellect,  but also “energy” (what he even called “Life Force”), and moreover, who throw “modesty” out the window in favor of the desire to acknowledge the extraordinary  and to unabashedly try to illuminate it. And all of this connected, in this teacher’s head, to an experience I had last week in my classroom.

So let me steal a couple more minutes from my gradebook deadline and share it. It’s this:

Single semester courses at my new school give Academic Excellence awards at semester’s end. One award is given per 50 students or so, and I have only 36 combined in my two Chinese history classes — a semester course.

So: given that a good six or seven students from those two classes all qualified as “academically excellent,” how choose one over the other?

Highest grade point average wasn’t the magic bullet, since the few tenths of a decimal point separating several of the students were surely as attributable to the performance of the grader — me — as to the performance of the students (that will be a revelation or a scandalous idea only to those who have never taught, read the research on, or thought for five unbroken minutes about the imprecision of grades as a measurement of student quality).

Long story short, I looked at the little canned script the school gave us teachers to read (optionally, bless their hearts) when presenting the award. It had a blank list of “five accomplishments” we were encouraged to fill out. I played along: 1) likes history; 2) good thinker; 3) good writer; 4) good speaker; 5) reliable and accountable, yadda yadda. Again, that still described at least five or six students.

Then it hit me.

Our Past is not Your Future — And Why That’s Bad News

What separated one from all the others was this: social intelligence. Call it “energy” or “life force,” if you will. It’s what the vast majority of “academically excellent” students are lacking. As  I tried to explain it  to the class when presenting the award:

The Dow topping the 10,000 mark aside, many economists are arguing that the U.S. economy may take years to recover to pre-crash levels in terms of something more important to most people than stocks — I mean jobs. Employment and production continue to decline, and many say those jobs may never come back.

High school students are so stuck in the myth that grades will lead to jobs — and so stuck in the textbooks about yesteryear — that they’re oblivious to this. The evidence for it pervades the classroom daily in the “I’ve done my work and I’ve got a high GPA, and that’s enough” attitude. I can slouch in my chair during class, use my mouth during discussions only as an oxygen-intake port, foul the collective sound- and vision-scape with complaints and sighs and sour looks, promote complacency by refusing to put any imagination or energy into improving the group experience, on and on. Again, my GPA is enough. It will get me into college, and college will get me into a job, because I have no inkling how much more difficult my future may be due to the several gathering clouds on the horizon — have no inkling, for example, that for every single vacancy in the professional job-rolls today, there are between five and six very qualified people seeking and needing that job.

The Only Thing Worse than a Suck-Up….

So in deciding how to give that award, I gave it to the person I wouldn’t only hire for being academically capable, but would promote for qualities of character: a person whose body language said “I’m awake and alert,”  whose facial language said “I’m not sour,” whose actions said “Let me help improve the class” instead of shirking that option — who was, in short, “energetic,” positive, constructive –  neither a “suck-up,” as I put it in class, nor, as importantly, a “suck-down.”

In a sense, by giving that student the award, I did “promote” her. That honor might, after all, be the tipping point in a favorable college application decision down the road.

I don’t know where I read it — and now that I think about it, I believe I saw it on a TV interview — but somewhere I saw a headhunter or executive type respond to a question about how the new economic landscape was affecting his hiring decisions, and his response should be posted above the gates of all schools for the privileged (such as mine): He didn’t care, he said, about an applicant’s academic pedigree, regardless of how ivy-covered it was; in fact, he went on, such a pedigree can even be a red flag and a demerit. Because the last thing he was looking for, he said, was people whose backgrounds led them to believe they were entitled to the best things in life. He wanted people who see  privilege as a thing to be earned.

This is something American students, especially, may need to hear, since they’re less able to compare themselves to their English-speaking peers from India and Asia — perhaps India especially, since it has two advantages over both East Asia and America: the presence of native English literacy skills equal or superior to those of American students, and the absence of the Confucian submissiveness and rote learning habits of many East Asian countries.

(The short version: watch out for India. It’s confident, it’s capable, it’s talkative; it’s hungry, it’s not spoiled, and it’s socially intelligent. This is made abundantly clear in my international school classroom every day.)

Psst…Your Code is Showing

In any case, in this age of the interwebs, this teacher once again shares with the rest of the world what he shares in his classroom, hoping it’s of value to students anywhere, whether they’re in his gradebook or not. What I hope you’ll take away:

First, your grades might get you in the door, but they won’t get you up the ladder. (And in this Age of Defining-Down “Success,” even getting in the door shouldn’t be taken for granted. Having a job at all, in other words, may be the “new” success. Just ask the 1-in-5 Americans currently unemployed or under-employed.)

And second, we don’t see you as a GPA, because we see the rest of you daily. How you walk and who you walk with, how you sit and how you compose your face, where your eyes go and don’t go, what comes (and doesn’t come) out of your mouth — all of things things are very obvious codes that we decode daily. And when you leave us, others with the power to pull you up or keep you down will take our place, and they’ll read those same codes.

I know this sounds crazy authoritarian, and that maybe one or two of you might be possessed of the type of genius that can beat the odds and conquer the world without an ounce of social intelligence or maturity of character. But — to share a dirty secret — I, like most teachers, really do want you to succeed. And I write this because I think it may help some of you.

Now here’s that TED Talk: