Relieving anxiety and delivering confidence to students' gains

The core cause of anxiety is not students' lack of ability, but the mismatch of expectations caused by a single evaluation system and poor information. By weakening the unified ranking evaluation, supplementing multiple growth path references, and strengthening individual micro-positive feedback, the combined strategy can not only effectively alleviate the general anxiety of the student group and convey stable development confidence, but also enable students to escape the trap of "standardized competition" and obtain real growth that adapts to their own rhythm.

Last week I stayed in the psychological counseling room of a provincial key high school for half a day. Three students came in in the morning. Two said they had dropped 20 places in the mock test and felt that their lives would be over if they could not pass the 985 test. There was also a kid in the first grade of high school who said that his parents had signed up for a competitive class in the second grade of high school. He even struggled to listen to the current physics class. "Every day when I close my eyes, I feel that everyone is running forward and I am the only one standing still." I am all too familiar with this feeling. The first sentence out of almost every student’s mouth is “I am not as good as others.”

Interestingly, there are actually two completely opposite voices in the education sector regarding the intervention of students' anxiety. One advocates "subtraction", cutting off all rankings, admission rate announcements, and competition publicity that may cause pressure, so as to give students a completely relaxed environment for growth;

I have seen extreme examples of both. Last year, a private junior high school experimented with "non-ranking". All exams only gave grades without rankings. In less than half a month, parents spontaneously organized a private ranking group and went to teachers everywhere to inquire about their children's rankings. On the contrary, because the students did not know their true position, their scores fluctuated greatly when they took the mock test. We measured that their anxiety levels were 30% higher than before. The employment office of another top university previously required all students to get two internships in large factories during their junior year. As a result, many students found internships in order to get internship stamps, and the failure rate of professional courses increased by 12%. When the autumn recruitment came, they neither had practical experience to show off, nor did they perform well in professional courses, which made them even more panicked.

Our pilot did not take a black and white approach. For example, in the pilot high schools, the rankings were not completely cancelled, but only the overall grade ranking was given to the students. It was not made public, and no class rankings were announced. At the same time, each student was given a "personal growth curve" - ​​if you scored 5 points more this time than last time, or the accuracy of a certain type of question increased from 30% to 70%, if you make progress, it is worth being happy, and there is no need to compare with the first place. There is also a "Sense of Achievement Record Book" that is not tied to grades at all. There are no requirements. Students can write whatever they want. Some students wrote "I finished half of the book "Three-Body" this week", some wrote "I finally passed the 800-meter run", and some wrote "I made a successful confession". There are all kinds of things. Every week, a few students will be selected in the class to share voluntarily. Last month, a boy who usually has a very low presence shared that the succulents he had been raising for half a year finally bloomed. The whole class applauded him. Later, the head teacher said that after that, he raised his hand more often in class.

In the pilot universities, we are adjusting the direction of employment guidance. The job sharing sessions no longer only focus on offers from large companies with an annual salary of 300,000 yuan. In the one held just last month, the guests included a senior who opened two cat cafes three years after graduation, a senior who worked on rural revitalization in Xinjiang, and a senior who worked on the front end of a small factory and is now the technical person in charge. After the sharing, a student came to me and said, "It turns out that even if I don't join a big factory, the front end I learned can be useful." Oh, yes, he was the boy who squatted in front of the employment guidance center for half an hour before and did not dare to submit his resume. Later, he took several small operation and maintenance projects he had done and applied for the senior's company. He has been working for half a year now. When he went back to school last time, he said that he now has two interns and he is not panicking at all.

Some teachers also mentioned to me that you are allowing students to "lay flat" and do not force them to compete. What will they do in society in the future? I always use the example of the girl who studied art in the second year of high school: she was in the middle of every mock test and cried every day while studying math. Later, she posted several illustrations she drew in her sense of accomplishment record book, only to find that her works had been requisitioned by the school’s public account many times. Now she plans to take the art test and study video transmission. She gets up at six o’clock every day to practice painting and has to make up cultural classes in the evening. She works harder than before, but she never said she was anxious again. It's not like lying flat. It's just that I finally found my own runway. I no longer have to follow other people's whistles and run around.

To be honest, anxiety can never be eliminated by shouting "you are the best". You have to let students really see that every bit of their efforts has repercussions, even if it is just feeding a stray cat, painting a picture, or understanding three questions. The more these small senses of accomplishment are accumulated, the more confident they will be. You also have to let them really see that there is more than one standard answer in life. Failure to get into a prestigious school is not a failure, and failure to enter a big factory is not a waste. You can still get the results you want by following your own path, and confidence will naturally spread.

Yesterday, I also received news from the boy who joined a small factory. He said that one of the interns he took this year had a child who was as anxious as he was back then. He told others about his experience and the child got his favorite offer last week. You see, confidence is something that can be passed on. Those real gains in growth can never be measured by a ranking on a test paper or a salary figure on an offer. Only what you keep in your pocket is real.