We lost my father to cancer 15 years ago, and while I often write about him in these columns, it seems particularly important to do so on Father’s Day.
One of his superpowers that I aspire to was that he was disciplined. He worked a 9-to-5 job, but on weekends, he was even busier most weeks with chores: lawn care, furniture refinishing, home improvement projects. I was in high school, I believe, or maybe even younger, when he and I had a conversation about chores and duties. My father told me whenever he had a To-Do List, he started with the most onerous task or the task he least wanted to tackle, and that practice, of course, made the rest of the list easier to get through.
It is so easy to put off the thing we do not want to do, and I’ll admit that I still do that more often than I should. However, doing the hard stuff is often the most rewarding. As John F. Kennedy said in his speech about the U.S. space effort in 1962, “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do other things not because they are easy, but because they are hard … .” Thus, my conservative father and this liberal president put forth much the same thought: Do the hard stuff, and do it soon.
On the other hand, leadership books talk about low-hanging fruit: Get some early wins, which will make the hard stuff easier to accomplish. Neither of these tactics are absolute; one finds oneself generally doing a combination of easy stuff that wins people’s confidence and still chipping away at the hard stuff, which may not yield immediate benefits, but may very well be worth more in the long run.
A university curriculum in some ways reflects that dual nature of completing tasks. Do the hard stuff first to coast through the easy stuff later, or do the easy stuff first to build confidence for the harder stuff to come?
Many students who wish to become nurses, for example, want to go into that profession to help people. Some of them breeze through the required math, biology and chemistry; others struggle. For that latter group of students, the hard stuff comes first, but if they stick with it, they can follow the path to the career that they aspire to.
Depending on the intensity of the struggle, some of these students will seek out another major that will still help them help people, but perhaps without the science requirement. For each student, that decision comes at different times; even honors students hit a wall at some point and encounter an obstacle that shakes their confidence.
A history student, for example, might love history, but find a junior-level course especially challenging. Our job at the university is to help the student persist to the best of their ability in the major of their choice by providing counseling, tutoring and other supports, and to help them find good options if they reach a point where their current major is just not going to work.
The other courses that many students dread are general education courses, which often fall outside a student chosen area of emphasis and are usually stacked up at the beginning. “Why do I have to take this stuff?” is the refrain we often hear. Yet those general education courses provide context for the major courses, and are often the ones students remember the most fondly later in life when the value becomes clearer to them.
I have heard business professionals cherish the skills they gained in theater classes. Scientists value their history and political science courses when world events touch on a country they learned about in a college class that they may have dreaded at the time.
My father was an auditor by trade, but his hobby was geology. He loved music of many types, and he loved to read when he had time to do so. These were the things he looked forward to after the chores were done.
Bonnie D. Irwin is chancellor of the University of Hawaii at Hilo. Her column appears monthly in the Tribune-Herald.
