bar height

How high is your bar? There are individual preferences and tastes. We may choose different heights at different points in our lives, based on the environment or our age.

Actually, I have owned a counter height kitchen set for the last 10 years and enjoyed it. I don’t mind being seated by waitresses at any of these bar heights.

What kind of bar am I thinking of today? The bar we set for ourselves to reach. Recently, I have noticed the vast range of bar heights during some student interactions in my online course.  Some of my students have sent emails asking excessive questions about the rubric, while some have had inconsistent performance.

Some examples:

Student 1: Does the page limit really mean that’s all we can include in that part of the paper? I have written my paper and it’s a little over the limit in sections. Will that be a problem? Immediately, I saw this student’s 1,000 other questions and her overachieving papers, discussion boards, assignments, etc. in my mind’s eye. To soften the blow, for Ms. Perfection, I said to her, please stay within the required page limits. It’s a valuable skill to be succinct and you have plenty of time to edit at this point. ( The assignment was due a week later, so she is always pushing the time up for everyone else and outshining.) Think about how high she has set her own internal bar. There is no grade above 100, so doing twice the work to reach that level is time consuming and tiresome.

Student 2:  I am sorry to inconvenience you, Professor, but I have been required to work overtime and had some personal problems, so this is way past due. I appreciate your email reminder and it may be too late for a grade, but I just wanted to do this for my own benefit to prove to myself that I could complete this course. Regular solid performance and then silence. Submission of assignments two weeks late, with an apology without asking for anything.  Slowly, I thought this one out.  We all have competing interests and obligations. So, I read the assignment and considered it. It was well done and so, I scored it with a reduction for being late. I reminded her,  this semester is over half way, so stick to her assignment schedule. I have confidence that you can balance these situations and complete the coursework on time. Think about setting your bar high and then missing it, because “life happens”. The student 2 sounded humble and earnest. Time will tell. She has no more “after the cut off” opportunities, so I hope she stays the course.

Student 3: Just wanted you to be aware that I got married and am on my honeymoon. There is no wifi and I will catch my work up when I get back. New student, within the first three weeks of the semester with one assignment due shortly after her wedding. This didn’t seem insurmountable, so, I quickly congratulated her on her nuptials and encouraged her to complete the work at your own pace, but, within the confines of the syllabus. She completed some assignments and then, the next thing I know, I got a notice that she withdrew from the course. She had a new job, a new husband, a new life and a course that might have been started at an inopportune time. I don’t know if her bar was set low for this course or if she just had the bar set higher for the things that mattered to her more.

I have personally experienced all of the above scenarios. I have been all three of those students, at some time or place in my life. Where is my “bar” right now? It looks low, but I think I see it moving higher as I make some adjustments. Can we have our bar set too high? I see that with “living like the Jones” or overachieving. Can we have it set too low? I see that with apathetic lifestyles and underachievers. It’s like the Goldilocks and the Three Bears question, ” Which one is just right?” I don’t know. The only thing that I do know is that we should be patient with others, because we’ve all been there ourselves!

This looks like a good bar height or is that a dock height?