Dear Joe,
I need some advice on how to motivate my teenage son. He’s in his senior year of high school and his grades have been terrible. So bad that I’m worried that he may not make it in to a good college. It’s not like he’s a dumb kid. He just doesn’t apply himself. He can be anything he wants to be he just lacks the motivation to work hard.
Dear J.B.,
You say the problem with your son is that he just doesn’t apply himself. But how can you be sure he son isn’t -- how can I put this delicately -- a moron? After all, there's certainly no shortage of stupid kids running around out there. Yet for some odd reason parent’s seem to prefer that their kids by thought of as lazy rather than ignorant. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I heard a mother blame bad grades on their kid’s mental capacity. Wait a second, I take that back. I can remember --it was my mom.
“Oh no, he’s applying himself,” she’d tell my exasperated teachers. “He’s just really that dumb.“
The truth is, though, that I was both lazy and thick-headed. None of my teachers would admit this, naturally, since it would have been detrimental to my self-esteem. Apparently, it was accpetable that I was a shiftless idiot as long as I didn’t feel bad about it.
Instead of telling me the truth about myself and motivating me to change, they told me I could be anything I wanted to be when I grew up. They also told me that someday I’d need to know algebra, that Latin was a useful foreign language, and that I was just going through an awkward stage and girls wouldn’t always find me repellent. In other words, teachers spend much of their time lying to kids. They do this because they secretly hate their students. (In fact, the only time I can recall a teacher come close to telling the truth was in 8th grade sex ed when my gym coach said, “You pathetic geeks will never actually have a reason to know any of this stuff.”)
Foolish me, I made the mistake of actually believing that I could be anything I wanted. For example, I spent several years harboring the delusion that I could be a doctor. Since I had seen every episode of ER and had almost passed high school biology I figured medical school would be a breeze. Then I found that becoming a doctor required eight years of higher education and that the eight years I spent in junior college wouldn’t count. I also found that the likelihood of my becoming a surgeon was impeded by the fact that I became queasy and faint from clipping my own toenails.
Eventually I lowered my aspirations and decided to find a career to match my skills and abilities. Then it occurred to me that I had neither any skill nor any ability. While there are a number of careers which don’t require brains, talent, or hard work -- politician, rap artist, high school guidance counselor -- I decided on journalism. The requirements for the job simply consists of telling people that you are a journalist and then finding someone to pay you. I’ve mastered the first part; it’s the getting paid part that is a bit tougher. If you truly want to motivate your son just tell him that the only job he'll be able to get is as a journalist -- and then show him a copy of my pay stub. That should do the trick.
[Note: This material was previously written for a faux-advice column I wrote for a small-town newspaper. Just because its not all that funny does not mean that it warrants sober analysis. This is just filler until I get back after the New Year so please don't take it too seriously.]