Goodreads Bookshelf
Sour Grapes
A week or more ago, I was talking about awards here at school and Rosebud asked whether there are any hurt feelings after the awards are passed out. After last Sunday's honors convocation, I can confidently say that yes, there are.
In fact, our tale of woe involves precisely the student that I mentioned in that post is at the heart of it. At our school, we have something called Prefects, students who are supposed to be leaders; their main job is to help the dorm faculty maintain order in the dorms, but they also have other jobs and they're just generally supposed to be good examples to the other students. Each year, one of the senior prefects is the Head Prefect, as elected by the out-going senior prefects and the faculty.
This boy seemed to think that he should be head prefect. I have no doubt that every single faculty member would disagree with that belief in a greater or lesser degree. Some would tell you that there is absolutely no prefect who should be less a candidate for head prefect, while others would simply concede that he isn't the best of our candidates. In fact, among the faculty, there seemed to be a hands-down consensus that this boy's roommate should be head prefect. I can easily summarize for you why this young man should not be head prefect: in that same honors convocation at which his roommate was announced as head prefect, we inducted students into the National Honor Society, one of the components of which is leadership, about which the induction materials said "One of the first things needed for leadership is an ability to put one's own desires below the needs of the group." Right there: this is exactly why he was such a pain in the ass in my choirs. It was always about him and almost never about the work we had to do, the music we needed to learn. He had to be the center of attention, clowning around, rather than putting the music at the center of things.
I gather that he was also upset because he didn't win any awards at the honors convocation, and of course the music award that he didn't win had to be fairly high up among the things that he might have expected to win this year. At the same time, two of his friends were named to leadership positions in campus groups and he wasn't. So he feels like his contributions to the community haven't been appreciated.
So what is his reaction to all this? He has resigned his position as a prefect. If he can't be head prefect, he won't be a prefect at all. If the school hasn't recognized what he does for the school, then he won't do anything for the school.
In short--though he wouldn't recognize it this way--if we don't believe that he deserves a position of leadership, he will prove us right. He will prove that he is immature, that when the going gets tough he will give up and that he would rather sulk than learn from a difficult experience, that in fact he can't even understand that he has any shortcomings--you can see, in his mind, anyway, that the failing is clearly in the school that has failed to see how great he is.
The thing is, the young man does have a lot of potential and he has contributed to the school--just not as much as he thinks. He has made progress (this is also the young man who came at Christmas-time to thank me for changing his life), just not as much as we would like or enough to deserve all the accolades that he thinks he deserves.
This spotlights just how hard it is to know oneself, especially at this age. Isn't that the root problem here? He doesn't understand himself, he can't step outside of himself either to put a group's needs above his own or to see how he is perceived by others, and he doesn't understand his own strengths and weaknesses. And, no doubt, it is a hard thing to do, not just at his age but at any age.
Weird. Just as I was finishing this entry, he came in, gave me a hug, and ran out. He insists, whenever I ask how he's doing, that he's fine. He even seems like he might believe it. At any rate, I sure hope that next year is good for him. I hope that he doesn't just stop caring and go from being an ass who at least has good intentions somewhere in there to an ass, plain and simple. I hope that he learns to discipline himself, to step outside himself, and to understand himself. A tall order, I know, and easier to wish upon someone else when I am gone....