by Claire Russell – Founder, Russell Tutoring
Lately, I’ve been thinking about students who are driven to achieve. We get to know students before we match them with a tutor. We tend to attract students who are already such high achievers that sometimes, their test prep or academic study program becomes about kind expectations and self-care as much as a score or grade goal. Every student has their own growth needs, and we welcome those at RTC.
Some students arrive to me confident in their abilities, and we can shepherd these students to great success easily. However, every week, students say things to me like, “People think I’m so smart, but I’m not,” and “I can never be as smart as (pick one)…“that math brain in my class who solves everything faster than me”/“that science brain in my class who instantly understands everything”/“that language brain in my class who never needs to work”/”my older brother”/”my older sister”/insert your toxic narrative here.
Many of these students think that they are already “behind” when they arrive to learn an academic subject or study skills with us as early as seventh grade, or to start test prep in their junior year. They may say things like, “I want to get a 36 on ACT/1600 on SAT” or “I keep making stupid mistakes.”
First y’all, reality check: no school in the country would ever ask for a perfect score on ACT or SAT, because they know that a perfect score comes from a combination of extraordinary test-taking talent and obsessive hard work learning test design, content, strategies, and pacing. While a 1600/36 is an amazing result, should we make perfection a realistic goal for our children when no school requires it?
Most students who have to work for every point on these tests resent the rare kids who don’t, and I get why. 😊 Like athleticism, perfect test-taking can be a gift, and most students fight for half of that natural talent. That’s why schools don’t require perfect scores; it would be cruel. I ask students to remember that test-taking is not only a born talent, but also a skill set: anyone can become an expert test-taker with study and practice.
While schools never knock a perfect score, even the elite schools are happy with a top score of ACT 33-35 or SAT 1460-1550. That score range shows brilliance and mastery without obsession – in other words, mental health. Schools are investing considerably in mental health services because our students are crying out for help. Schools like Harvard and Stanford require top but not perfect scores for many reasons, and one of them is balance.
In all our tutoring, we challenge driven students’ narratives that their worth is defined by their achievement. With kind, consistent messaging supported by their parents, we remind students of all their gifts, and that they are precious by their mere existence. In our test prep lessons, we challenge many high-achieving students’ narratives that “Everyone wants to get a perfect score on their ACT/SAT.”
In test prep, we first reflect reality to these students. In real life, students come to me with a variety of baseline scores and score goals; very rarely does a student seek perfection. Often, perfectionist students doubt me: they are so convinced of the competition at their high schools that they are sure everyone else wants the perfection they seek.
Guess what they find out? As they talk to their peers, these driven students learn that not everyone else is the perfectionist they are. Most top-achieving students are aiming for a score in the 30’s/1400’s on their test. Not everyone is staying up until 3 am writing papers for that demanding teacher. For the first time, these obsessive students wonder if they can stop sinking so much time into miserable perfectionism. Epiphany! 😊
Our tutors take all students to the scaled scores of the ACT and SAT exams. Each test has a slightly different difficulty, and the test makers account for this in their scoring. For example, you may get 6 incorrects on one test section and reach your score goal, while you may get 8 incorrects on another. Test-taking is about a measure of accuracy as compared to difficulty, not your perfection or worth compared to an absolute standard. As a test-taker, you can strategically give up chess pieces to reach checkmate. Considering your score goal, about how many questions can you answer incorrectly per passage?
Our tutors talk with students about their score goals for their target colleges. We talk about how ACT or SAT (their best test; we usually prepare for one) is a measure of their college readiness skills. We tell them, This isn’t school, where you are measured for being a thorough and thoughtful student. This is a standardized test, where you are measured for your bubble sheet answers on college-readiness and test-taking skills. This is a skill set, and I want you to think like a clever, efficient test-taker.
Once students realize the range of incorrects they can afford to reach their score goals, they can breathe a little. Progress becomes not about “my score on this practice test” but accuracy and analyzing mistakes, learning critical thinking strategies, test content, and design.
A test score isn’t a measure of your worth or perfection. It’s a measure of your skills and learning – thinking strategically to improve on a test based on its design and criteria. In ACT and SAT, it’s a measure of your college readiness. Simple. Where are you in terms of the colleges you want to apply to?
Often, driven students initially want homework to be about quantity over quality: they want to crank out test after test, aiming for an elite score. Meanwhile, their tutor wants them to pause and think about test design and how they’re getting things wrong. Why do you think those test guides provide explanatory answers? The test designers are asking you to noodle through the critical-thinking skills that college requires on each question. How about we think about how the test fooled you? In lessons, we do that noodling together. Students learn that taking apart a test can be fun! 😊
Whether in academics or test prep, we sometimes find our high-achieving students are prioritizing self-punishing studying with unkind narratives over constructive, contained studying with regular, mindful breaks and self-care. In test prep, we have homework requirements and high expectations, but we also prize self-advocacy. We encourage students to negotiate their homework with a supportive, safe adult tutor if a week at school becomes overwhelming. We prioritize students’ health, balance, and well-being above all else. After all, if we model obsessive studying as ideal, then students may become workaholics who’ve never learned work-life balance. What kind of happy life is that?
We would like your student to have a happy, balanced life, and sometimes, that starts with healthy test prep. Sometimes it starts in academic tutoring, where we encounter a bright but struggling student entering middle or high school. This student is used to understanding and learning quickly, but must slow down and take care for the first time, learning step work, study or organizational strategies to succeed in a subject at a higher level. Often, our driven students in test prep or academics arrive to us assuming that because their entire brilliant family appears to think and work quickly, they shouldn’t have to use academic strategies, or maybe even study at all. Upper level academic or test prep work has been a rude awakening for them.
We teach all driven students that in learning any new skill set in test prep or academics, the Navy SEALS teach us slow makes smooth, and smooth makes fast: you first slow down as you are learning and practice carefully to develop your skills. Then you get efficient, expert, and quicker! Often, high-achieving students never saw their elders do the slow, painstaking work of learning, so they assume their parents and older sibling(s) were always so seemingly good and fast at everything. As parents and teachers, if we can model for these youngsters something we struggle with, or tell them stories of times where we struggled and worked hard to acquire a skill, we model for them that everybody struggles sometimes.
When it fits, I tell my students about my learning to box. I’m utterly uncoordinated, and boxing is a full-body sport. I had to practice painstakingly for years, making mistake after mistake, speaking patiently and kindly to myself as my naturally untalented body very slowly learned the required muscle memory to box skillfully in combinations. These students understand that learning something physical is challenging for me, which is one reason I do it: I want to stay connected to frustrated learning so I can help my students power through too. If I can develop a mean hook, any math student can learn to graph a parabola.
Can you learn a new skill together with your high-achieving child, or challenge yourselves with a task or project the two of you can think, problem-solve, and struggle through together? This would teach them abundantly about your patience and humility as a learner, not your perceived achievement as their parent.
If we model comfortable imperfection and mistake-making as learning for our driven children, they learn they’re safe to make mistakes with us. This helps them thrive while living in their skin as their amazing, imperfect selves. When we help our driven students develop a healthier relationship with making mistakes as they learn, they grow to understand that achievement comes organically from learning and hard work. Parents are the most essential models of healthy learning for our driven students, and it starts in our daily modeling for them.
Sometimes, students have very unkind self-narratives due to expectations they perceive from culturally or generationally high-achieving families. Whether these narratives are true or not, our driven students perceive that “failure” (less than perfect) is not in the narrative of their family DNA, and they struggle with this in their own self-narratives. We address this first in lessons, coaching them toward a kinder and more constructive understanding of learning. Sometimes, we find mindfulness coaching can be a key tool in helping these students understand their value and build a deep inner confidence in the face of high-achieving parents, elder siblings, and extended family. As a student’s needs present, we make recommendations to families.
In addressing your whole child’s needs, in listening to their unhelpful inner narratives and challenging those as we support each child to learn, together we can help your driven student become a happier, healthier learner. In my experience, this approach naturally results in extraordinary, organic achievement from a child who possesses abundant self-belief and joy in learning. For me, that’s what effective teaching is all about.
After all, what our high-achievers so often need to learn is that learning is about the journey, and that the grade or test score is the organic result of learning and work, whatever it may be. When an obsessive student who only thinks about the “A” can begin to challenge their inner narratives and simply learn to enjoy working with an adult tutor toward a goal – noodling, growing, and building confidence – that can be transformative for them over time.
