Bullshitting Your Way Through School is Good?
Have you ever heard a student claim they are just “bullshitting” their work in class?!
I’m guessing different kinds of educators have different feelings about the idea of a student intentionally “bullshitting” assignments.
Classroom teachers, for example, might be used to seeing students use a whole lot of words in an essay to say nothing -- and I bet that feels like “bullshit” in a not-so-good way.
As an academic coach, though, I love it when a student tells me they are “bullshitting” an assignment…because…Wow! It’s unusual to get some metacognitive framing from students about their own processes, and the use of this word shows that they have an assessment about the work they are producing. That is an exciting first step!!
I like to get really curious about what a student means when they use the word “bullshit” to describe their assignments. Their answer to my inquiry will tell me a LOT about these students:
their beliefs about themselves as a learner
their expectations for their performance, and perhaps even
how this student actually learns best (versus how they perceive they should be learning).
In the Anti-Boring Learning Lab, I’m on a mission to help educators transition from their “soap box” to the “curiosity train,” lecturing less and getting curious more.
To illustrate what I mean, let me tell you a story about what happened recently (I tell this story very passionately in today’s video, so feel free to jump to that if you want to feel my excitement viscerally):
I was at a happy hour for local teachers hosted by a great educational organization. While standing at the bar to cash in one of my two free drink coupons, I struck up a conversation with a speech therapist in the local school district. He shared that he has ADHD and that grad school for speech pathology was painful.
Of course, whenever someone starts talking about themselves as a learner, I perk up and hop on the empathy bandwagon (another great place to be instead of the “soap box”):
“Oof! I BET grad school was painful. There’s so much science you had to memorize in a program like speech therapy, and I’m sure that was HARD!”
“It was,” he said, “and I pretty much bullshitted my way through.”
Aha!! There’s that word: “bullshit!” So many students use it to describe their relationship to their learning, especially students who have lively intellectual capacity alongside attentional limitations.
When I hear it, sirens go off in my head. I shifted from the empathy bandwagon to the curiosity train:
“Ooooh. Tell me more! How did you bullshit?”
He launched into telling me how much he hates to read textbooks, and that he could never get very far in them. “Honestly, I learned more from joking around with my classmate who also happened to be my good friend. He was better at reading the information and paying attention in class, and I learned enough from joking around with him that I could bullshit my way through my answers on tests.”
My eyes twinkled with this response. “Do you realize what a good learner you are?! You found ways to honor how YOU actually learn!! Joking with your friend sounds like a GREAT way to learn otherwise boring information. What you were missing was a few more anti-boring strategies for how to stick with some of the other boring learning -- like reading textbooks.”
I then proceeded to tell him about my YouTube channel, and he agreed that yes, these kinds of strategies would have been very helpful to him.
Side note: Does anyone else find it weird that programs like speech pathology (that are designed to help students be better learners, among other things) don’t use what they know to support their learners who are studying to be speech pathologists?! I get super aggravated (Uh oh. Do I hear a “soap box” lecture coming on?!) about college and graduate programs that don’t practice what they preach!!
This is not unusual, of course -- even teacher education programs are not taught in such a way to help students understand themselves as learners, and learn to apply this understanding to being better teachers. Harumph!
It seems like most organizations and institutions suffer from a gap between theory and practice, and the world of education is especially guilty of this. Another one of our missions in the Anti-Boring Learning Lab is to help lessen this gap so educators get more practice understanding themselves as learners…so they (1) put the science of learning into practice in their own study practice and (2) have more empathy for their students’ struggles to do the same.
But let’s get back to bullshit.
Let’s unpack this. What IS shit?! After all, isn’t shit created by digesting food?! What if “bullshit” in a learning context was simply what is created after we chew up and digest the information being taught to us? (Thanks to one of my amazing Anti-Boring Credentialed Coaches Erin Wilson for this nugget).
To extend this metaphor, it’s ALSO true that some shit is created after a person has chewed too quickly and not taken the time to truly break the food down into its smallest parts.This can cause quite a…uhhhhh… back up in the intestines. Similarly, in learning, students can engage in bullshitting their answers without having fully taken in all the information at hand which results in a… well… maybe this is where the metaphor breaks down. A bad grade? Not learning the information? Not being able to apply the learning to real world contexts? You get the idea.
If I’d been this speech therapist’s learning coach in grad school, I would have asked him whether he’d like to learn a strategy for “chewing his food more thoroughly first.” I would have then taught him how to skim a textbook. When we were standing at the bar the other night, I gave him the “least you need to know” version of this strategy. He responded, “Yep! I can see how that would’ve helped.”
Your Turn
What if…the next time you have a student who claims they are bullshitting their answers, you don’t automatically jump to reprimanding them…but, instead, get curious?!
To do that, ask questions. My favorite questions to ask include:
On a scale of 1 to 10, how smart was your bullshit? How do you know?
A bunch of follow-up questions will likely flow from there, and you’ll enjoy getting to know more about how this student sees themself as a learner. Also, you might just share my analogy about how shit is created, and explore how well they are “chewing” the info they’re learning, as well as whether they’d like some strategies for how to “chew” the info they’re learning a bit more completely before “bullshitting” it out onto the page.
When you try this, let me know how it goes! What are the most effective questions you ask? How do your students respond?