From the time I knew what it meant to win at something, I have been a classic overachiever — the student council president, straight A’s, awful kind that people hate. I live my life trying to smash the top off of whatever it is I’m doing. It has been pointed out to me many times that this could become a problem in my chosen profession. Since beginning my student teaching internship at the beginning of this semester, I have encountered more types of underachievers than I thought possible.
   There’s the pretend-to-care underachiever who listens to instructions and makes the teacher think he’s on the right track, only to “forget” to turn in his work. The I-don’t-get-the-simple-direction-you-just-said-three-times underachiever who has learned to use the phrase “I don’t know” to her advantage. The underachiever who asks for a pencil and paper every single day. And the one who hurts the most: the underachiever who just plain doesn’t care because everyone has given up on him.
    As the person now responsible for getting these students to care about language arts, I’ve been thinking a lot about what makes a person underachieve, and for that matter why someone would choose to push themselves in the first place. In a 2007 research study by Angela Duckworth, she suggests the best predictor of academic success is self-discipline, not intelligence. Students may have high IQs but be unable to motivate themselves to succeed for various reasons, and vice versa, students with low IQs often overachieve in the right circumstances. So then, if IQ is often far less predictive of academic performance than work ethic, what makes a student choose to overachieve? According to Duckworth, underachievers might find it difficult to choose long-term benefits over short-term fun.
     However, studies about the realities of stereotype threat suggest that the issue may be far more complicated than a simple lack of motivation. Stereotype threat is a documented phenomenon in which students who are expected to perform poorly live up, or down as the case may be, to those expectations. The studies have shown that women who are told that females do worse in math do worse on math tests. The same is true for African-Americans who are told that the odds are against their success. For students who are told by society at large, as well as by the school and their families, they aren’t smart enough to succeed, “hard work” is not an easy choice to make.
   So, it turns out it’s not that hard for an underachiever to relate to an overachiever as people may think. As someone who likes to win, I certainly get the urge to give up when it looks like I’m going to lose. Furthermore, like most people, I often frame my life by figuring out what the bare minimum is so I can get the grade or reach the goal I want to accomplish. Though I often go beyond that minimum if possible, I am highly attuned to the practice of getting by. It just so happens that the standard I try to reach is an A, whereas many of my students just want to know what they have to do to pass.  Underachievers and overachievers both just try to do what they can to make their lives better, whether for the short term or the long term. And that’s something we can all understand.