Why words matter

You’re applying for a job. You’ve requested recommendation letters from three professionals who know you, your work ethic, your work. What three adjectives would you hope to see in such letters?  Affectionate, nurturing, and agreeable? How about confident, outspoken, and intellectual?

Personally, I would be very upset if anyone wrote about me using the former series of terms. This (unfortunately) gendered language, deployed in a well-meaning recommendation letter, can actually hurt a woman’s chances of landing an interview or getting hired. When I saw this article on a friend’s Facebook page, I commented that I would be disappointed if I discovered that anyone had ever used the term “nurturing” to describe me as a teacher. From my perspective, nurturing and teaching are two different things. Parents nurture; teachers teach. 

Gendered language difficulties aside, the term “nurturing” suggests anything from coddling and babying to a positive, hand-holding, and holistic approach to a relationship or situation. Nurturing is for parents, brothers and sisters, close friends, and those types of personal, intimate relationships rather than the student-teacher dynamic that should be entirely focused on the work of the class.  Being nurturing can be misinterpreted and potentially perceived as inappropriate in an educational setting.

While I agree that a certain degree of nurturing and affection may be necessary and even valuable in kindergarten or fourth grade, I don’t see a place for nurturing (as I’ve described it) in the college classroom. In fact, I will even go a step further and boldly suggest that any tendency toward nurturing at the post-secondary level contributes to the accountability problem that we continually see when students are told all their lives that every effort they make is good enough. 

Here’s a news flash: Sometimes those efforts aren’t good enough. Sometimes you must do better. This is a cornerstone of my teaching persona and my approach to business. Perhaps it is because of my business and journalism background that I have a colder and more abrupt attitude about achievement, but I enjoy challenging my students, getting them to see their writing and their abilities differently, pushing them outside their comfort zones. The goal is success, but not by making my students feel good about themselves. I want them to question what they think they know and come up with answers – this is hard work. Challenging and pushing are the hallmarks of any productive college classroom – we all want to challenge and push our students. And here is where I seem to diverge from some of my fellow teachers: I truly believe that challenging and nurturing are two different objectives. You cannot challenge a student and nurture them at the same time. 

Some of my colleagues disagree and see “nurturing” as a valuable characteristic in a teacher. Perhaps it is simply a matter of definitional difference – those who see nurturing, affection, and agreeableness (for instance) as beneficial to learning versus seeing it as detrimental.  Nurturing connoted as caring, encouraging, supportive, rather than my more negative interpretation. Once our students graduate, they will navigate a world that is distinctly unforgiving and demanding, a world expecting a high performance level with little room to screw up. This is the world that I try to expose my students to, even in a small way, even by just saying, “This isn’t a story.  You can do so much better.” That’s not very nurturing in my book, but it IS honest and oddly inspirational. 

When I asked one former student if she ever thought of me as “nurturing,” she laughed and said, “No!” To which the others standing around tittered nervously, but she continued on, clarifying that when I told her during the course of Advanced Comp that what she had written was terrible and not achieving the objectives of the assignment, she said she knew she had to make it better. She knew she could do better. I wasn’t telling her anything that she didn’t already sense, but my saying it so bluntly made it real and immediate, spurring her on to action. She knows that I care – about her success – but not about her holistic being and overall human experience. That student worked very hard to reach that high bar I’d set and ended up getting her creative nonfiction story accepted and published by a literary journal. Ain’t nothin’ wrong with that.

There is nothing wrong with breaking students’ complacency and expectation that everything they write is golden. Criticism abounds in the world beyond our safe walls. I tell my students all the time that I am the safety net. I will push them in ways they’ve never been pushed and they may fail, but I will give them the chance to try again and succeed. This doesn’t happen in other environments. Once you are hired to do a job, you are expected to get it right…all the time. No safety net, just judgment. 

A little taste of that judgment in a safe and encouraging (not nurturing) academic environment strengthens students and gives them a glimpse of the world they plan to inhabit in one, two, three years. A colleague suggested that students do need to be nurtured because if faced with this kind of criticism and honesty, they would crumble. My response was to ask what is going to happen then, in a few years’ time, when that student leaves academia and faces even harsher criticism with greater consequences than disappointing a respected teacher or getting a bad grade? 

I welcome your perspective, whether you teach or not. Should all teachers (whether male or female) be “nurturing,” “agreeable,” “affectionate,” and should these be welcomed and celebrated characteristics for women in any field (academic or otherwise)? Why do we think of characteristics such as independence, assertiveness, and confidence as “male” when many women naturally possess these and always have (I include myself here)? These characteristics are just good qualities – person qualities, not “male” or “female” qualities. But in terms of recommendation letters, if the general assumption will be that the gendered “female” terms will be detrimental, should we take it upon ourselves to ask our recommenders NOT to use such terms in the first place, even though that clearly indicates our assent to the negative assessment of these “female” terms?

Words matter. Regardless of how you answer my questions, be aware when writing a letter of recommendation or when describing a female colleague that the words you use have consequences.