In my last post, I discussed the importance of taking responsibility for your schoolwork, both successes and failures, and how making sure to give yourself credit for positive outcomes can help you take responsibility for negative ones. I don’t know if you noticed it, but the one word I did not use in that entire post was blame. The more you focus on taking responsibility when things don’t turn out as you wish they would, the less you will focus on blaming yourself and/or others for your own or their mistakes, and the less you focus on blame, the more you will be able to focus on finding solutions to challenging situations. Taking the blame yourself and/or assigning blame to others is tempting, and learning to resist it isn’t easy, but the more you can do it, the better off you’ll be.
One of the most convenient places to lay blame when you are struggling is with your teachers. You may think the teachers of your more challenging classes are too strict, or that they assign too much work, or that you don’t like their teaching methods, but instead of blaming them for making things too difficult for you, try to think of things you can do to make things easier, including asking them for help. If they offer help, be sure to take them up on it, even if it means sacrificing your free time to do it. Try to remember that they are sacrificing their time to help you, and remember what I’ve said before about seeing them as people. This also applies when, instead of simply making things challenging for you, they actually make mistakes – a teacher misplaces an assignment you know you turned in, or forgets to do something you’ve asked them to do, or makes changes to an assignment or the content of a test without warning- even in these cases, your teachers are human, just as you are. If they admit their mistakes and either apologize or offer to do something to make up for what happened, accept it and move on, just as you would expect them to do for you.
Another convenient place to lay blame when things are not going well is on your circumstances. Though many of you have faced challenging circumstances throughout your schooling, and all of you can say that for much of this past year, you have faced circumstances beyond anything you would have ever thought possible, it is still the better course to take responsibility for doing the best you can with your circumstances than to blame your circumstances for your struggles. The more able you are to do that through the remainder of this school year, the more prepared you will be for next school year, when things will hopefully be looking up for all of us.
Whether or not you are someone who has blamed your teachers and/or your circumstances for your struggles, perhaps the most convenient place of all to lay blame when you are struggling is on yourself. It is only too easy to blame your learning challenges for your failures- being convinced you can’t do something because you are different from your classmates or siblings or friends is easier than committing to the hard work of changing both your mindset and your results. Taking the responsibility to overcome your challenges takes a lot of courage – but I am here to tell you that it can be done. One of my greatest strengths was my study skills – I was even voted “most responsible” in my eighth-grade class! – and that is why I always believed as a teacher, and still believe now, that the development of good study skills, no matter your challenges, is one of the best ways to take responsibility for your schoolwork and give yourself the greatest possible chance at success.
Just as I reminded you at the beginning of this post that I did not use the word blame in my previous post, I will tell you at the end of it that I do not intend to use the word blame in future posts, either. Just as I will shift my focus back to taking responsibility for your work through the development of your study skills, so I will now ask you to do the same. Any time you are tempted to place blame for your failures, remember that your teachers are human, your circumstances can be improved even when they can’t necessarily be changed, and instead of blaming yourself for what you can’t or didn’t do, take responsibility for what you can or did do. No one is perfect – I’m not, and I certainly don’t expect you to be- but the more you focus not on blame, but on responsibility, the more able you will be to focus not on failure, but on success.