fir-trees-unite asked:

My entire life English has been my thing – my best class, I even just started writing a novel. And AP Lang is kicking my butt up down and all around.

Advice on avoiding the soulcrushing feeling that I lost a large part of my identity to this class?

realsocialskills said:

I think it might help to remember that this class is not an ultimate test of whether you’re good at writing.

It’s one class. I don’t know why it’s kicking your butt. There are a lot of possibilities.

For instance:

New skills that don’t come naturally to you:

• Sometimes students who are good at a particular subject expect that everything about it will always come naturally to them.
• In the long run, that’s unlikely to be true.
• No matter how good someone is at something, there will probably be things that are difficult, unnatural, and have a steep learning curve.
• This can be scary the first time students experience it, particularly if they have a lot of identity hung up in being good at something.
• Particularly if they’re young enough that their peer group might be made up of people who also haven’t experienced struggling with their strongest subject much before.
• If that’s the issue, it might help to remember that this is normal. Everyone struggles with something related to their field in the long run. That’s ok.
• And it also might help to remember that part of being great at something is learning how to do hard things
• Most people who write seriously consider writing to be difficult.
• Writing is probably going to be hard sometimes. Sometimes it’s going to feel like a miserable slog. It’s still worth doing. For a lot of writers, writing through the stuck places is a vital part of what makes good writing possible.

The class might be designed to kick your butt. Some classes are like that, eg:

• Some teachers assign things that they know are barely possible for their students
• The point of this is to push you hard to increase your skills dramatically over the semester
• Teachers who do this tend to keep making the assignments harder as their students develop more skills
• Your teacher may be assigning books they expect most or all of the students to find extremely difficult to read
• Your teacher may be having you write in ways that they know will be very difficult
• Or holding you to very high standards that they expect to be only barely possible for you to meet
• Struggling with that kind of class doesn’t mean you’re bad at English
• It means that you’re in a class where the teacher is pushing you really hard, and not giving you any chances to do anything comfortable
• If this is a factor, it might help to remind yourself that it’s ok to struggle when you’re being asked to do difficult things

The grading standards might be more difficult than you’re used to:

• Different teachers grade differently
• In most classes, there’s a default grade you get if you do all the assignments more-or-less competently. In some classes, that’s an A. In others, it’s a B. In others, it’s a C.
• If you’re having to work much harder for grades than you’re used to, it may well just mean that the scale is different.
• (Even if it’s a teacher you’ve had before; many teachers grade AP classes more stringently).

Your classmates might be different than you’re used to:

• Sometimes students are used to being much better than their peers at a subject
• Then they take an advanced class, and everyone else is good at the subject too
• Then they’re not dramatically better at it anymore, and feel like they must not be good at it after all
• This is also common among people who are used to being at the top of their class in high school, then go on to an elite school and have peers who were also at the top of their classes
• If this is what’s going on, it might help to try to focus on doing things well rather than doing them better than your peers
• And to remember that if you’re around others who are strong in your subject, you can learn from them as well as the teacher
• You don’t have to dramatically outperform everyone else for your skills to be real
• Writing well and reading seriously matter as ends in themselves, whatever test scores say.

The class might suck:

• Some classes are terrible and make students feel terrible.
• The teacher might be giving you unreasonable or unclear assignments
• The assigned books might be excruciatingly dull.
• The writing assignments might be pointless busywork that makes you hate writing.
• The teacher might be mean.
• Your classmates might be mean.
• You might have access needs that the teacher isn’t meeting.
• Or any number of other ways classes can suck.
• Most people who go to school for a long time deal with classes that suck sometimes.
• If that’s the problem, it might help to keep in mind that bad classes don’t mean you’re bad, and that the class will end.

You might have a lot of other stuff going on.

• High school is hard on a number of levels for a lot of people.
• Particularly the last two years, in which there can be a lot of pressure to believe that your future will be ruined if you don’t push yourself superhumanly hard.
• Life in general can be hard for all kinds of reasons.
• Sometimes when stuff is really hard, people find things difficult that they normally are able to do easily.

Mental or physical health:

• If you have a mental or physical health condition, that can make school harder.
• Some mental and physical health conditions tend to start in adolescence.
• Long-standing conditions often also change or develop complications in adolescence.
• Health conditions in adolescence are not always diagnosed quickly or treated appropriately.
• Even when things are managed well, they still have to be managed, and that can still complicate things a lot
• And that’s not always acknowledged, particularly when people want to reassure you that your brain is fine and you are totally mentally normal
• The reality is that mental and physical health problems, as well as treatment, tend to make school harder
• It can help to remember that it’s not your fault that dealing with health is hard and takes time and can suck in other ways and makes things other than health hard sometimes.
• Or, as one of my friends once said to me, “it turns out that brains care more about oxygen than they do about academics.”

Disability issues:

• Sometimes students with disabilities start needing academic accommodations when their classes get harder.
• For instance, someone who could take notes by hand in an easy class might need a computer to take notes in a hard class.
• Someone with dyslexia who can read 20 pages a week of standard print might need to use a screenreader for a class that requires 120 pages a week.
• When students haven’t needed accommodations before, or haven’t needed them in a while, it doesn’t always occur to anyone that they might need them now
• (Particularly if they were pushed really hard to learn to do something in the standard way, and were able to do so for a few years before classes got harder).
• If you have a disability or suspect that you might, it’s worth considering whether you would benefit from modifications or support.

And in general: There are any number of reasons this class could be hard. This class is not a test of whether you are good at English, whether you are good at writing, or whether you should write a novel. If you want to write, you can do that, and do it well, no matter what happens in this class.

Short version: A lot of things can make classes hard, even in subjects you’re used to being good at. Those classes aren’t tests of whether you’re good at the subject, or whether you can keep doing the things you’re interested in. They’re just classes. It’s ok to do hard things.