The Achievement Habit (15 page)

I got angry and blurted out, “This is the fifth week of class. It is inconceivable to me that you would not be able to identify a four-bar mechanism. We have been talking about them twice weekly since the first class. Where have you been?”

The woman did not say a word. She left in tears and never returned. She was from China, and it was especially humiliating to her that I had caused her to lose face in front of the entire class. As soon as I realized what I had done, I felt terrible. Week after week I hoped she would return. To this day I regret that I did not reach out and contact her.

Two years later, she showed up in a class I was coteaching with Sheri Sheppard, designed to be supportive of women graduate students. Sheri was the only female professor in Stanford’s Department of Mechanical Engineering at that time. We used some of the techniques presented in this book, and the class passed without incident. I noticed for the first time, however, how very shy this student was. I finally realized what a frightening experience being in front of the design class must have been.

At the final feedback session this student told me, “You were much nicer in this class than the last one.” It relieved a bit of the guilt I carried for my previous insensitivity to her shyness.

We have many foreign students at Stanford. Some come from cultures that are fairly aggressive, and they tend to fit right in. Many others come from cultures where students are taught to be passive receivers of knowledge and to consider faculty as unapproachable, almost as deities. For such students, and for naturally shy American students, the Silicon Valley culture can
be especially trying. Behaviors such as self-promotion, group work, approaching strangers, seeking assistance, meeting with an instructor during office hours, and speaking up in class can be difficult for them.

Nowadays, with people working, studying, and living in countries that were foreign to their forebears, analogous cultural difficulties exist in many parts of the world. This situation is especially worthy of attention when you have people from another culture who were born in your country or who speak your language. You must not assume that just because someone speaks your language well, she is comfortable with your culture. In interacting with others it is important to look for the outliers and take into account their discomfort with what may seem very natural to you.

Outliers can occur at both ends of the spectrum. I had a PhD student from Shanghai who was most unusual. In those days, before the economic upswing, most students from the People’s Republic of China were supported by their government and lived frugally, worked diligently, and used bicycles or walked. They saved what money they could get to buy things to take back home. This young man did not fit the mold. He bought a car during his first few months. Then he started not showing up for our weekly meeting. When he did appear, I was not impressed by his output.

I gave this student several minor reprimands, yet his behavior remained spotty. Finally I’d had enough. Even though a close colleague in Shanghai had recommended him to me, it was time to end the relationship. I told him that I did not want to continue to work with him, and he should find another thesis advisor. He astounded me by telling me it was not fair to dismiss him in this manner. I asked him what he thought would be fair.
He suggested a point system similar to that used by the Department of Motor Vehicles: each offense has a specific number of points associated with it, and you lose your license only if your total exceeds a certain number of points.

This was too amusing to turn down. We agreed on a system of points. Amazingly, he shaped up immediately after our agreement, and never got close to having his “license” suspended. He finished in a reasonable time with a good thesis. After graduation he found a job on the East Coast, got married, had a child, and never went home to China.

On the other end of this spectrum, I find that when I go abroad, I am often the outlier. It takes a little courage to introduce a bit of interactive California teaching style. Once I was with a classroom of students in a regional college near Mumbai. After I worked hard to break the ice for about forty minutes, I got the students to open up and we had a nice interaction going. The director walked in and, after a few minutes of observation, decided he would “help” me. He loudly announced, “I request you do not interrupt the professor until after the lecture.”

If looks could kill!

In any group setting it’s important to realize that not everyone thinks like you do, whether because of cultural differences or just differences in style. Aim to understand each other’s communication preferences and learn from each other.

I have often had the experience that after students miss a class, they come to me for the lecture notes. My style is to lecture extemporaneously, so I do not really have a set of lecture notes to give the student. Instead, I’ve proposed what seems to me to be a perfectly reasonable alternative. I suggest that the students
copy a classmate’s notes, go over them, and then come to me to discuss anything they feel unclear about. Often it turns out that the students don’t know anyone else in the class, and they’re not sure who to ask about borrowing notes. It’s as though students in the same class are ships in the night, passing each other with just enough recognition to avoid collision.

My urge to assist students in breaking through this veil of anonymity was one of the factors that led me to create courses in which students interact with each other. In this context I devised an exercise that has been very effective in getting people to connect. This connection helps to break through the ships-in-the-night phenomenon of people being in the same environment and not connecting. Airplane travel has evolved into a classic example of people spending hours together, including sleeping next to one another, without communicating.

An effective group icebreaker is to divide the class into pairs in which each tells the other what type of person she is; this provides good experience in both talking and listening. The students then are asked to relate what they heard about their partner to a different group of partners. This is a good way for us to discover how poorly we listen and how little we remember.

After the first introductions, a great way to connect with a larger group is to form circles of six to eight people and have them each take turns completing the same sentence. The sentences I use always begin with “The last time I . . .” After everyone has completed his response to a given sentence, I introduce the next sentence to the group. This time a different person goes first, and when this round is completed, a new person begins with the next sentence. I use a different human experience for each round. They thus end up completing sentences such as:

The last time I laughed was . . .

The last time I cried was . . .

The last time I had trouble sleeping was . . .

The last time I did a good deed was . . .

The last time I got angry was . . .

The last time I did something brilliant was . . .

The last time I did something stupid was . . .

The last time I had a mystical experience was . . .

The last time I stole something was . . .

The last time I lied was . . .

The last time I thought about suicide was . . .

The last time I felt love was . . .

I have found this technique also works well with groups in settings outside the university.

This is a very effective exercise on several levels. It gets people to find out a little bit about each other and to start to form connections with others in the group. It is also a way for people to see that we all share a common basis of experience. We all laugh, cry, lose sleep at night, and do things we are proud of, things we are not proud of, things we regret, and things we are ashamed of. That is all part of the human experience.

We often hide parts of ourselves because we feel others would not understand or would disapprove; we are sure they do not do similar things. My experience is that students from all over the world have had similar emotional experiences—after all, we are all human. It goes a long way toward establishing trust when students tell their stories to each other. I arrange the room so that I do not hear the stories that go with the responses. I do this to emphasize that this is a student-to-student sharing experience.

It always turns out that the more you reveal about yourself, the more people like you. It is ironic that we hide aspects of
ourselves because we fear rejection. It is the hiding, not the revealing, that leads to rejection.

Apply these same ideas in a private conversation. Next time you are having a leisurely conversation, tell your acquaintance what type of person you think you are and then ask her to tell you about herself. Then go on to share the last time you could not sleep all night and ask your partner when that happened to her. From there start trading stories about the last time you had a good laugh, the last time you made a bad mistake, and so on. At the end notice how your relationship with the other person has been altered by the details you shared.

Some people identify strongly with their names, others hate their names, and many others are more or less neutral in their feelings. I have asked students to rate their feelings about their names on a scale from 1 to 10. I’ve gotten ratings all along the scale.

I used to do a class exercise in which I asked the students to shut their eyes and think about the name that best describes who they are, or if they feel they already have the correct name, to pick another one that just feels good. Then I asked them to mill around and interact with each other, staying in the persona that their new name implies to them. This is an interesting way to briefly try out “changing your skin.”

If you are not happy with your given name, it is relatively easy to do something about it, either legally or simply by choosing to go by a name other than what’s on your official documents.

Some people purposefully distort the pronunciation of their names to hide or downplay their ethnic origins, while others
insist on an authentic ethnic pronunciation that seems exaggerated to outsiders. Choosing a less ethnic name is most commonly seen in show business. However, it also happens in the general workforce. A man named José Zamora reported that he was sending out hundreds of résumés and getting no responses until he removed one letter from his name and became Joe. It’s terribly unfair, yet experiments have consistently proven that applicants with Latino names and “black-sounding” names (such as Lakisha Washington or Jamal Jones) don’t get called for interviews nearly as much as those with “white-sounding” names (such as Emily Walsh or Brendan Baker).

People’s relationships to their names are complicated. It is best not to assume anything. One thing is for sure: if you use someone’s name, you take the relationship to a different level than when you do not. Many people mistakenly believe they have trouble remembering names. I have always found there is a lack of intention and attention underneath their defeatist attitude.

People take the time in some groups to have each person say her name aloud. This method seldom gets the names learned, and it is more a pretense than an actual taking of responsibility for the name issue. Name tags are a common tool for avoiding the issue of really dealing with names. It is easy with name tags to pretend that people know each other’s names.

If we really want to handle learning people’s names in groups, there are many ways to proceed. One is to break into subgroups of two people and then build up from there. The trick is to get something memorable from each partner. An easy way to do this is to come up with something unusual that you both share; this serves as a “hook.” For anything—including a name—to be remembered, it must be dwelled upon and repeated. Thus, when you and your partner join another pair, you
should introduce each other to the new pair and give them the hook that you both share. You can keep enlarging the group size and get everyone to repeat each person’s name and the hook that goes with the name.

For groups of thirty or less I prefer to deal directly with the entire group, having everyone stand in a circle, and each person say his or her name in turn. In the low-stress version, the students repeat in unison the name they just heard. In the high-stress version, each person takes a turn and gives his name and the names of all the
people who have gone before him. The exercise can, in both cases, become more fun, and the names get easier to remember (they become “stickier”) if, in addition to his name, the student also simultaneously introduces himself with a whole-body physical gesture; then the others repeat both the name and the gesture. The gesture is easy to remember, and it makes the name easier to remember.

It is useful to reinforce this learning by giving each person a list of the names to take home, and, if possible, also photos. For subsequent group meetings I have photos and names posted in the room for easy reference.

Regardless of what we do in the group, I always assign myself the homework of learning names as soon as practicable—usually by the second meeting. Many teachers never learn their students’ names. I never used to. Why bother? Now I realize that I just didn’t want to devote any effort to it. I thought that if it didn’t happen automatically, it was because I didn’t have the ability. In reality, it has nothing to do with ability; it is a classic case of not giving the required attention to carrying out the intention. This is a sure way to develop a nonachievement habit.

People who perform prodigious feats of memorizing go through all sorts of special efforts to pay attention to what they are memorizing. They know you cannot memorize something without giving it particular attention. It is mindfulness rather than brain structure that differentiates “them” from “us.”

On the other hand, you can assist others to remember your name. If you add a memorable hook when you introduce yourself, your name becomes easier to remember. People with difficult names also help others greatly by spelling their names. Even simple names can often be confusing. When I say my last name, people sometimes hear
Ross
rather than
Roth
. So I always spell it when I say it to strangers or over the phone.