Stress Is Not Always A Bad Thing

Throughout this blog, we’ve often talked about the dangers of the pobrecito syndrome.  The pobrecito syndrome is an adult mindset where we feel so sorry for certain students, often our language-minoritized populations, that we don’t have the same high expectations that we have for our monolingual, English-speaking students.  The pobrecito syndrome is rooted in the desire to keep all possible factors of stress away from our students so that they may feel our love.

This need to protect our students only goes up when we decide that our students have experienced trauma.  First, let us be clear.  Speaking another language is an asset… not trauma!  Furthermore, even if some of our students have experienced actual traumatic events in their lives, all students will not process the same events as trauma.  And trauma is not addressed through lowered expectations.  

Nevertheless, we, as educators, often try to respond to our need to protect our students by limiting stress.  Unfortunately, stress-free environments are not conducive to learning.  The Yerkes-Dodson Law of Arousal (graph above) tells us that there is an optimal, Goldilocks level of stress where student performance peaks.  This is why students who may take longer on homework or make more errors on daily work do better on timed tasks or tests.  They are responding positively to an increase in pressure.  Of course, let’s be clear that when we talk about stress, we are referring to academic challenges, not social pressures.

For students, just as there is a Goldilocks level of challenge that they need to experience for cognitive growth, there is also a Goldilocks level of stress and pressure where they will perform at their peak.  Once students reach their “maximum cognitive efficiency,” or the peak of their productivity, any additional pressure will cause the student’s performance to decline.

The amount of stress and pressure that you can exert on each student will be different.  Some students are naturally motivated and will strive in response to greater amounts of pressure.  In fact, they want additional challenges because they naturally like to meet higher expectations.  Other students may be naturally anxious or new to being held to higher expectations and not respond as well to too much pressure, but as they become more accustomed, they begin to adapt.  Furthermore, the same student who has more expertise in one subject may respond well to greater pressure in that subject than in a subject in which they have less confidence.

In the end, if we want each of our students to reach their maximum potential, we need to give them the opportunity to stretch their cognitive muscle and rise to new academic heights.  If we do not do this for our students, we are in fact failing them.