Who are the “Achiever” and the “Troubled Teen”?

Reflections from a professor who has been labeled both

We’re all at the mercy of our brain’s heuristics: the shortcuts that allow us to make sense of vast amounts of information. We ascribe labels to people as a short-hand way of understanding them. The trouble with labels isn’t always the labels themselves. It’s our inability to interrogate our own understanding of those labels. Here, I reflect on two common labels ascribed to students, labels that I intimately relate to, the “achiever” and the “troubled teen.”

The Achiever

For most of my secondary school life, I was a near caricature version of the “achiever.” I absolutely loved school. I took honors and Advanced Placement (AP) classes and got straight A’s. My mother still marvels at the fact that even in elementary school, she never had to ask whether my homework was done. I competed with my fellow achievers to see who could maintain the highest “A” in class. I hung my first B+ on the wall in my bedroom to remind myself what “failure” felt like. I was as much of a perfectionist in sports as I was in school.

Anyone who teaches, coaches, or parents achievers is used to students being tough on themselves; being perfectionists. This is not always a problem, but it certainly can be.

Are they so hard on themselves that they speak in generalities about not being good enough? Do they hold themselves to standards that are entirely rigid and impossible? Do family members have unreasonable expectations of them as well? Is their self-worth so unsteady that it’s shaken by one test, one performance, or one rejection? (my hanging the B+ on the wall is a great example) Do they focus so acutely on memorization and getting As that they miss out on in-depth appreciation of the class material?

Answering these questions requires us to get to know our students beyond the work they submit in class, and beyond over-simplified labels like “achiever.”

Achievers are often perceived as competent, well-adjusted, and mature. This was true of how teachers, school counselors, and my parents perceived me. I don’t mean to suggest that these perceptions are wrong. Much of the time, they are accurate estimations of a student’s academic and social abilities. They just may not be the full story.

If competence is measured by GPA, I was indeed competent. I was well-adjusted in several ways: I had healthy social relationships, took responsibility for my school work, and stayed organized despite a hectic schedule.

I also hid an eating disorder that gave me heart palpitations and made it difficult to get out of bed without losing consciousness. I berated myself based on impossible standards I set for myself in school and in sports. I was under tremendous strain due to stress at home. I began displaying other troubling symptoms that my mental health was suffering.

The Troubled Teen

Everyone but me was shocked when I “suddenly” transformed from the achiever into the troubled teen; characters that are often seen as mutually exclusive. In reality, the transformation was anything but sudden. The strain I coped with for many years through perfectionism became too great for that coping mechanism sustain the pressure.

In typical “troubled teen” fashion, I skipped class. I barely squeaked by with C’s or D’s in some of my classes. I failed one or two. I didn’t care to turn in assignments no matter how much they’d affect my grade. I engaged in unhealthy and reckless behavior outside of school. I withdrew from sports, which had been of the ultimate importance to me from the time I was old enough to hold a tennis racquet. This behavior seemed to strike my teachers, coaches, and everyone who knew me as odd considering my placement in mostly honors and AP classes. I just don’t think they knew how to interpret the oddness, or that there was anything they could do to help.

During senior year of high school, my Government teacher pulled me aside to tell me I would fail his class if I didn’t stop being so irresponsible. He told me how shocked he was when he learned that a student like me was enrolled in an AP class. I was used to berating myself, but I wasn’t used to such harsh and direct criticism from teachers. It stung. I was frozen, with all the things I wanted to say to him (to scream at him) stuck in my throat.

I wanted to tell him how illogical it was for anyone to expect me to care about school. Why should I, when I had much more pressing things to worry about: when I had basic emotional needs that went unmet for years? I wanted to tell him how much I loved learning; what an achiever I really was at heart, but that the achiever was drowning.

In contrast to the achiever, the troubled teen is traditionally seen as immature and poorly adjusted. It’s heartening to see how much these perceptions continue to transform. Many education systems strive to build trauma-informed schools and prioritize mental health in addition to academics. There is no way to overstate the importance of this work and its role in promoting healthy, meaningful learning environments.

Many recognize how unfair, harmful, and inaccurate assumptions about the “troubled teen” are. After all, was my former self reacting immaturely to my Government teacher’s harshness? Though I hadn’t yet learned about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, I recognized the basic principles. And I had the sense to be angry that the adults around me didn’t.

The Exceptions

Despite drastic changes when I became the troubled teen, I still gave my best effort in a couple of classes: classes I would never skip no matter how early in the morning they were. Classes I never turned in a late assignment for. So, what was different about the people who taught those classes? There are a couple things that stick out about these exceptional teachers:

• Simple as it is, their willingness to treat me with respect made all the difference. They adopted a default assumption that I was capable, smart, and wanted to learn. When I was an achiever, these teachers respected me enough to never let me off the hook. They held me to high standards, not for test scores, but for critical thinking. They gave me constructive feedback which helped me eventually understand that I valued learning more than I valued achievement. When I became the troubled teen, they did not change this view despite my concerning behavior. They still saw a capable, smart kid; just one who was going through struggles.
• They gave me opportunities to express myself. While this was automatically built into the creative writing classes I loved so much, any great teacher creates these opportunities. They ask simple questions about students’ lives. They give them options to complete projects in creative ways. They check in with students when they notice a behavioral change.
• They cared enough to do something. A particular creative writing teacher of mine had always promoted free and vulnerable expression. He was used to reading material with dark themes. One day, he pulled me aside and told me that although he almost never comments on the personal content of a student’s writing, he was concerned about something I’d written and thought I should talk to the school counselor. It took me some time to fully appreciate what he’d done. He treated me with a high level of respect as a writer and a person. He never infantilized or over-simplified me. He also recognized that I was still a kid: a kid who was suffering. A kid who needed and deserved support. It meant that much more to me because he had already invested in me, as a writer, a student, and a human being, throughout the school year and earned my trust.

What to make of these labels?

So, was I actually an achiever or a troubled teen? I think I was absolutely both. I was also so much more. For me, it wasn’t damaging that people noticed my stereotypical achiever qualities. It was damaging when they didn’t recognize that I was simultaneously: mature and overwhelmed, intelligent and self-destructive, self-motivated and self-deprecating to the point of pathology. Along the same lines, it wasn’t damaging that people recognized my behavior as that of a troubled teen. It was damaging when they mistook my state of crisis for irresponsibility. It was damaging when they saw only my underachievement and never my potential.

The problem wasn’t necessarily the labels themselves, but that the labels were seen as beginning, middle, and end to the story of my identity. They should have been a starting point to prompt curiosity. A teacher, coach, or school counselor doesn’t have to know a student’s entire life story to ask the question “why is this student acting this way?” in a nonjudgmental way. They don’t have to have magic solutions to fix a student’s troubles, or even understand them.

Exceptional educators are curious people. They have the cognitive flexibility to recognize when they are labeling, and to ask deeper questions. They see their students as human beings and build relationships with them based on students’ unique personalities and needs. With increased emphasis on testing scores, many exceptional teachers are trying to do this with one hand tied behind their backs. They have to combat the inevitable message that test scores reflect a student’s worth and ability to learn: a message that is harmful to students with all variety of personalities and learning needs.

Still, any adult who recognizes the complexity of a young person’s experience and honors their perspective can make a tremendous difference. The teachers who did this for me helped relieve the strain felt by so many adolescents who long to be seen, to be taken seriously, and to have control over their own lives. One of my favorite poets, whose work I began reading in high school, puts it better than I ever could:

“So much of adolescence is an ill-defined dying, An intolerable waiting, A longing for another place and time, Another condition.” -Theodore Roethke