bad behavior essay

Reflective Essay Topics for Negative Behavior

Common Struggles in High Shcool

Written reflections on negative behaviors can focus on both past and future actions. By thinking about what happened and how it can help or hurt future goals, students can learn life lessons from their own reflection and through the advice of others.

Admiting What Went Wrong

One of the most important steps of changing negative behavior is understanding what went wrong. Have students carefully think through their actions and have them specifically write, in detail, what they did that was hurtful or disruptive to themselves or others. For example, a student who is calling other students names should stop and think through how her words made other students feel. One essay topic might be a journal entry from the perspective of a classmate. Ask the student to consider how she would feel if someone treated her in a similar way. The point is not to shame the student, but rather to make her aware of how actions affect others.

Developing Alternatives

Encourage students to write about how they could have handled a difficult situation in a more positive way. For instance, if a student is caught lying, ask him to write about the merits of honesty and ways the situation could have been handled better. Students could be required to write about two or three ways to deal with situations in which they might normally be tempted toward destructive behavior, such as disrupting class or fighting with classmates. This can serve as a preemptive tool for future scenarios.

Have Students Focus on the Future

Students can be inspired toward positive behavior and away from negative behavior by writing about their own future success. Teach for America suggests that students think of themselves in college or an exciting career and then write about how negative behavior distracts them from their goals. Allow students to keep these written reflections and encourage them to reread their essays often. Consistent reminders of plans can serve as ongoing encouragement well after the paper is complete.

Show Students Where to Seek Advice

Push students to seek the advice of others. Tell students to interview school staffers, parents, neighbors or older siblings to document their life experiences in making good and bad decisions. After they've talked with two or three people, have them compile the advice into thoughtful essays that reflect on the decisions they've made that have helped or hurt their individual progress. Encourage students to review these essays with parents or important adults in their lives to reinforce these life lessons through follow-up conversations.

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Why Children Aren't Behaving, And What You Can Do About It

Cory Turner

Childhood — and parenting — have radically changed in the past few decades, to the point where far more children today struggle to manage their behavior.

That's the argument Katherine Reynolds Lewis makes in her new parenting book, The Good News About Bad Behavior.

The Good News About Bad Behavior

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" We face a crisis of self-regulation," Lewis writes. And by "we," she means parents and teachers who struggle daily with difficult behavior from the children in their lives.

Lewis, a journalist, certified parent educator and mother of three, asks why so many kids today are having trouble managing their behavior and emotions.

Three factors, she says, have contributed mightily to this crisis.

First: Where, how and how much kids are allowed to play has changed. Second, their access to technology and social media has exploded.

Finally, Lewis suggests, children today are too "unemployed." She doesn't simply mean the occasional summer job for a high school teen. The term is a big tent, and she uses it to include household jobs that can help even toddlers build confidence and a sense of community.

"They're not asked to do anything to contribute to a neighborhood or family or community," Lewis tells NPR in a recent interview. "And that really erodes their sense of self-worth — just as it would with an adult being unemployed."

Below is more of that interview, edited for length and clarity.

What sorts of tasks are children and parents prioritizing instead of household responsibilities?

To be straight-A students and athletic superstars, gifted musicians and artists — which are all wonderful goals, but they are long-term and pretty narcissistic. They don't have that sense of contribution and belonging in a family the way that a simple household chore does, like helping a parent prepare a meal. Anyone who loves to cook knows it's so satisfying to feed someone you love and to see that gratitude and enjoyment on their faces. And kids today are robbed of that.

It's part of the work of the family. We all do it, and when it's more of a social compact than an adult in charge of doling out a reward, that's much more powerful. They can see that everyone around them is doing jobs. So it seems only fair that they should also.

Kids are so driven by what's fair and what's unfair. And that's why the more power you give kids, the more control you give them, the more they will step up.

You also argue that play has changed dramatically. How so?

Two or three decades ago, children were roaming neighborhoods in mixed-age groups, playing pretty unsupervised or lightly supervised. They were able to resolve disputes, which they had a strong motivation to because they wanted to keep playing. They also planned their time and managed their games. They had a lot of autonomy, which also feeds self-esteem and mental health.

Nowadays, kids, including my own, are in child care pretty much from morning until they fall into bed — or they're under the supervision of their parents. So they aren't taking small risks. They aren't managing their time. They aren't making decisions and resolving disputes with their playmates the way that kids were 20 or 30 years ago. And those are really important social and emotional skills for kids to learn, and play is how all young mammals learn them.

The Key To Raising A Happy Child

While we're on the subject of play and the importance of letting kids take risks, even physical risks, you mention a remarkable study out of New Zealand — about phobias. Can you tell us about it?

This study dates back to when psychologists believed that if you had a phobia as an adult, you must have had some traumatic experience as a child. So they started looking at people who had phobias and what their childhood experiences were like. In fact, they found the opposite relationship.

People who had a fall from heights were less likely to have an adult phobia of heights. People who had an early experience with near-drowning had zero correlation with a phobia of water, and children who were separated from their parents briefly at an early age actually had less separation anxiety later in life.

We need to help kids to develop tolerance against anxiety, and the best way to do that, this research suggests, is to take small risks — to have falls and scrapes and tumbles and discover that they're capable and that they can survive being hurt. Let them play with sticks or fall off a tree. And yeah, maybe they break their arm, but that's how they learn how high they can climb.

You say in the book that "we face a crisis of self-regulation." What does that look like at home and in the classroom?

It's the behavior in our homes that keeps us from getting out the door in the morning and keeps us from getting our kids to sleep at night.

In schools, it's kids jumping out of seats because they can't control their behavior or their impulses, getting into shoving matches on the playground, being frozen during tests because they have such high rates of anxiety.

Really, I lump under this umbrella of self-regulation the increase in anxiety, depression, ADHD, substance addiction and all of these really big challenges that are ways kids are trying to manage their thoughts, behavior and emotions because they don't have the other skills to do it in healthy ways.

How Schools Are Handling An 'Overparenting' Crisis

You write a lot about the importance of giving kids a sense of control. My 6-year-old resists our morning schedule, from waking up to putting on his shoes. Where is the middle ground between giving him control over his choices and making sure he's ready when it's time to go?

It's a really tough balance. We start off, when our kids are babies, being in charge of everything. And our goal by the time they're 18 is to be in charge of nothing — to work ourselves out of the job of being that controlling parent. So we have to constantly be widening the circle of things that they're in charge of, and shrinking our own responsibility.

It's a bit of a dance for a 6-year-old, really. They love power. So give him as much power as you can stand and really try to save your direction for the things that you don't think he can do.

He knows how to put on his shoes. So if you walk out the door, he will put on his shoes and follow you. It may not feel like it, but eventually he will. And if you spend five or 10 minutes outside that door waiting for him — not threatening or nagging — he'll be more likely to do it quickly. It's one of these things that takes a leap of faith, but it really works.

Kids also love to be part of that discussion of, what does the morning look like. Does he want to draw a visual calendar of the things that he wants to get done in the morning? Does he want to set times, or, if he's done by a certain time, does he get to do something fun before you leave the house? All those things that are his ideas will pull him into the routine and make him more willing to cooperate.

Whether you're trying to get your child to dress, do homework or practice piano, it's tempting to use rewards that we know our kids love, especially sweets and screen time. You argue in the book: Be careful. Why?

Yes. The research on rewards is pretty powerful, and it suggests that the more we reward behavior, the less desirable that behavior becomes to children and adults alike. If the child is coming up with, "Oh, I'd really like to do this," and it stems from his intrinsic interests and he's more in charge of it, then it becomes less of a bribe and more of a way that he's structuring his own morning.

The adult doling out rewards is really counterproductive in the long term — even though they may seem to work in the short term. The way parents or teachers discover this is that they stop working. At some point, the kid says, "I don't really care about your reward. I'm going to do what I want." And then we have no tools. Instead, we use strategies that are built on mutual respect and a mutual desire to get through the day smoothly.

How To Raise Brilliant Children, According To Science

You offer pretty simple guidance for parents when they're confronted with misbehavior and feel they need to dole out consequences. You call them the four R's. Can you walk me through them?

The four R's will keep a consequence from becoming a punishment. So it's important to avoid power struggles and to win the kid's cooperation. They are: Any consequence should be revealed in advance, respectful, related to the decision the child made, and reasonable in scope.

Generally, by the time they're 6 or 7 years old, kids know the rules of society and politeness, and we don't need to give them a lecture in that moment of misbehavior to drill it into their heads. In fact, acting in that moment can sometimes be counterproductive if they are amped up, their amygdala's activated, they're in a tantrum or excited state, and they can't really learn very well because they can't access the problem-solving part of their brain, the prefrontal cortex, where they're really making decisions and thinking rationally. So every misbehavior doesn't need an immediate consequence.

You even tell parents, in the heat of the moment, it's OK to just mumble and walk away. What do you mean?

That's when you are looking at your child, they are not doing what you want, and you cannot think of what to do. Instead of jumping in with a bribe or a punishment or yelling, you give yourself some space. Pretend you had something on the stove you need to grab or that you hear something ringing in the other room and walk away. That gives you just a little space to gather your thoughts and maybe calm down a little bit so you can respond to their behavior from the best place in you — from your best intentions as a parent.

I can imagine skeptics out there, who say, "But kids need to figure out how to live in a world that really doesn't care what they want. You're pampering them!" In fact, you admit your own mother sometimes feels this way. What do you say to that?

I would never tell someone who's using a discipline strategy that they feel really works that they're wrong. What I say to my mom is, "The tools and strategies that you used and our grandparents used weren't wrong, they just don't work with modern kids." Ultimately, we want to instill self-discipline in our children, which will never happen if we're always controlling them.

If we respond to our kids' misbehavior instead of reacting, we'll get the results we want. I want to take a little of the pressure off of parenting; each instance is not life or death. We can let our kids struggle a little bit. We can let them fail. In fact, that is the process of childhood when children misbehave. It's not a sign of our failure as parents. It's normal.

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Bad Behaviour in Schools [IELTS Task 2]

Posted by David S. Wills | Oct 29, 2022 | Model Essays | 0

Today, I want to show you a sample band 9 answer for an IELTS writing task 2 question about bad student behaviour. This is an interesting topic and I’m sure people will have various opinions on it, but I want to give you some guidance to help maximise your chances of writing a great essay.

Analysing the Question

Here is the question that we will look at today:

In many countries, schools have serious problems with student behaviour. What do you think are the causes of this? What solutions can you suggest?

As you can see, this is a two-part question on the topic of education . It is not particularly hard to analyse. You only really have to do two things:

• Explain why bad behaviour in schools is now a problem.
• Suggest solutions to this problem.

You don’t have to do anything else, but you must cover both of these ideas in your essay.

Planning your Answer

You do not need to be an expert in education to answer this question, but you should present some intelligent ideas. You can learn about how to generate good ideas for task 2 questions here .

Try to group your ideas into two parts, so that you can more effectively structure your essay:

You can see that I have put five ideas into each category, but I would not actually write all five ideas in my essay. Remember, you should aim to write about 260-300 words .

It is important to choose only one or two of the best ideas and then expand them. This is important for making an organised and developed essay. That will help improve your score for Coherence and Cohesion and Task Response.

Here’s how I will structure my answer:

Now let’s look at my essay

Sample Band 9 Answer

In many parts of the world, student discipline is becoming a major issue that teachers, parents, and school administrators have to deal with. This essay will first look at the reasons why this is happening, and then explore solutions for it.

The primary reason for this increase in bad behaviour is the lack of respect for teachers in western society since the late twentieth century, which is partly due to the emphasis placed upon personal freedoms and individual rights. With massive cultural upheaval, the role of a teacher has diminished, and school pupils can run amok. Nowadays, teachers are powerless to stop their students from misbehaving in the classroom, and what is worse is that they are afraid of the consequences of being firm in their disciplinary procedures. When teachers are deemed to be too strict, parents will complain and it is possible that the teacher could lose their job. 

In order to solve this, great changes will need to be made. For a start, a teacher’s authority needs to be established, and this means making changes that reduce the likelihood of their position being questioned. From misbehaving pupils to unreasonable parents, there needs to be support for the teacher from above. This sort of institutional help has been missing for decades as education becomes more of a service industry wherein “the customer” is always right. Schools need to implement firm but fair rules that all pupils must abide by and there should be equally firm but fair punishments meted out accordingly. 

In conclusion, discipline problems are now common in many schools, and that is because teachers are no longer given the respect they are due. Schools and government authorities need to work to reinforce the importance of respecting teachers.

Notes on the Answer

Here’s some useful education vocabulary from my essay:

• school administrators
• cultural upheaval
• misbehaving
• disciplinary procedures
• institutional help
• implement… rules

You can read another sample essay about education here . You can also Google “education” and then read stories from newspapers around the world to get new ideas and language about this important IELTS topic .

About The Author

David S. Wills

David S. Wills is the author of Scientologist! William S. Burroughs and the 'Weird Cult' and the founder/editor of Beatdom literary journal. He lives and works in rural Cambodia and loves to travel. He has worked as an IELTS tutor since 2010, has completed both TEFL and CELTA courses, and has a certificate from Cambridge for Teaching Writing. David has worked in many different countries, and for several years designed a writing course for the University of Worcester. In 2018, he wrote the popular IELTS handbook, Grammar for IELTS Writing and he has since written two other books about IELTS. His other IELTS website is called IELTS Teaching.

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The Brain Science Behind Bad Behavior in Kids

Learn why young people struggle to use their words during stressful situations..

Posted August 1, 2021 | Reviewed by Tyler Woods

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• In order to guide kids through problem situations, it is essential to begin with a basic understanding of how the human brain responds to stress.
• Developmentally, young people’s brains tend to be dominated by the limbic system.
• In the heat of the moment, kids lack the ability—not the will—to put words to how they are feeling.

In order to effectively guide kids through problem situations, it is essential to begin with a basic understanding of how the human brain responds to stress and perceived danger. From an evolutionary perspective, the oldest part of the human brain is known as the brainstem. Also called the reptilian brain, this part of the brain (that still dominates the overall behavior of creatures like snakes and lizards) controls human survival functions such as breathing, heart rate, and balance. A key feature of the brainstem is that it does not learn well from experience but rather repeats instinctual behaviors over and over in a fixed way (Baars & Gage, 2010).

Applying knowledge of the brainstem to our interactions with kids helps us understand that when the brainstem is activated, a child’s heart may automatically race, their breathing may instinctively quicken, and/or their blood pressure may suddenly rise, causing their face to flush or their bodies to feel uncomfortable. All of these physical responses are automatic and beyond a child’s active control. They are the brain’s natural way of preparing the body to protect itself from danger—which is essential for survival.

The Limbic System

Layered over the brainstem is the mammalian brain, often referred to as the limbic system or, in simplest terms, the emotional brain. The limbic system directs the human body’s emotional responses. Developmentally, young people’s brains tend to be dominated by the limbic system. When adults causally remark that a child seems to be driven by their emotions, they are usually quite correct.

The limbic system includes the amygdala, an almond-shaped structure that is responsible for the body’s fight, flight, or freeze response. When the amygdala perceives any kind of danger, it directs the body to either fight the threat (e.g. through yelling, physical aggression ), flee the situation (e.g. by running away, withdrawal), or freeze up (e.g. shutting down emotionally). Fight, flight, and freeze reactions are all brain-directed, instinctual responses, rather than purposeful, willful, or intentionally defiant acts.

The brainstem and limbic system work closely together. When the amygdala perceives a threat in the environment , it activates the survival functions of the brainstem. Together, these parts of the brain adhere to the “better safe than sorry” principle, activating survival functions and flight/flight/freeze responses anytime they detect a threat, without necessarily evaluating the nature of the threat. Have you ever jumped when you saw something coiled in the grass, only to realize it is a garden hose rather than a snake? That’s your amygdala talking.

A critically important feature of the limbic system is that this part of the brain does not have access to words and language. When activated by a perceived threat, the limbic system is not able to communicate with the parts of the brain responsible for language, or even logic.

The Neocortex

The neocortex, or the thinking brain, as it is commonly called, is the part of the brain that kicks in to remind you that you left the hose out earlier in the day and that you don’t need to fight the “coiled figure” or run away from it.

The neocortex is involved in “higher” brain functions such as problem-solving, reasoning, planning, logical thought, and language. Developmentally, the neocortex is not fully mature until a person is in his/her twenties. It is not surprising then—nor should it be the mark of a “problem” child—that kids need consistent adult intervention and guidance to be able to fully access the logical, rational, thinking part of their brain.

It is also worth noting that, while adult brains typically are dominated by the neocortex, we, too, in times of stress, can revert to behaviors that are driven by our emotional brains. As caring adults, we must be ever mindful of our responses to a child’s troubling behaviors, making sure that we control our reactions in a rational way, rather than an amygdala-driven, conflict-fueling one.

Applying Brain Science to Working with Challenging Children

As noted above, the limbic system does not have access to words and language. It is critical for professionals and caregivers to be aware that when a young person’s body is instinctively gearing up to deal with a stressful situation, it is unable to put language to all of this emotion .

As adults, we want (and often demand) that kids “use their words” to tell us what they are upset about. Having an understanding of the limbic system’s dominance over a young person’s brain activity during a stressful situation helps us understand why, in the heat of the moment, kids lack the ability—not the will—to put words to how they are feeling. This basic understanding of how a young person’s brain functions is critical because it helps us, as adults, adjust our expectations and accept that kids are doing the best they can with the brains they have.

Bernard J. Baars, Nicole M. Gage, in Cognition, Brain, and Consciousness (Second Edition), 2010

Signe Whitson, L.S.W., is a licensed social worker and the co-author of The Angry Smile: The Psychology of Passive Aggressive Behavior in Families, Schools, and Workplaces.

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Behavior Matters in Our Life Analytical Essay

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
• As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
• As a template for you assignment

Behavior is an imperative attribute that defines how a person relates to others in the society. This is apparent since behavior is an action or reaction that individuals exhibit in response to external and internal stimuli.

In most instances, negative or positive behavior can be instilled in a person through diverse actions of friends and peer groups.

For instance, bad behaviors are borrowed normally from individuals who are immoral and irresponsible, while positive behaviors are contributed by morally upright, wise or elite personalities in the society.

The discussion on behavior enhancement is relevant taking into account that good behavior fosters peace, coexistence, productivity and good performance that is needed, while bad behavior encourages hatred, divisiveness and inhumane activities that kill cohesiveness.

Currently, there are rising number of indiscipline cases in most schools and societies. The increasing cases are attributable to inferior behavior that individuals including students have formulated.

According to the insight given by department of education, training, and employment (DETE) (2009), most students have developed queer behaviors in the recent past. They have become violent, irresponsible and rogues who do not take in instructions.

The formulated behaviors have made them subject other students to inhumane practices. The unbecoming behaviors of students have also led to the increase of school unrest in the recent past in most settings.

This trend has been worrying various stakeholders in the education sector, who affirm the need for reformation of students (Paton, 2012, p. 1).

Based on the identified facts, probable strategies that can be a doped to help in mitigation of the problem of bad behavior are choice direction and description of obvious realities in life. Teachers and parents can implement these strategies effectively (DETE, 2009, p. 26).

For instance, teachers can adopt a choice direction to nurture students. The strategy is viable since it entails directing learners to practice decent activities, engage in morally sound practices, and refrain from bad behaviors (Paton, 2012, p. 1).

Teachers and parents can also use the strategy to educate students on the best activities that they should engage in and a choice of friends to make. They can as well be directed on career issues and decent ideals that shape life.

Variably, the description of obvious realities is a strategy that stakeholders in the education sector can adopt and implement to ensure that students are nurtured well. The strategy entails giving students’ practical examples on how good behavior is an asset and its contrary effects.

It holds the capacity of enabling students to understand obvious realities in life on issues that appertain to social and economic injustices.

They will understand that life offers you what you give out. If you conduct yourself unsuitably, you will receive terrible results (Appleton-Knapp & Krentler, K2006, p. 259). This will enable them to consider integrating good virtues and values.

As noted, various strategies can be adopted to help in eradicating bad behavior among students. However, the most effective strategies that are adopted in this paper are choice direction and description of definite realities in life.

The two strategies are appropriate because the behavioral development is dependent on diverse factors and guiding principles (Case, 2007, p. 24). The factors include the source that is giving guidance and direction on issues that touch on social and character development.

If the behavior developer is bad, then the mentored person is likely to take up horrific actions and if the mentor is good, then the person being mentored is likely to be excellent.

In most instances, especially under choice direction, students are expected to be mentored by successful individuals who are of good character. This is essential in enabling them to emulate noble characters and behaviors that are good in life (Appleton-Knapp & Krentler, K2006, p. 259).

Both behaviorist and human theorists affirm this aspect. The theorists hold that individuals tend to develop behaviors that are in their mentors. For instance, students normally learn from individuals who are in their surrounding because they contribute in shaping how they make choices.

They copy their actions and reactions to various issues (Bernardi, Metzger, Scofield Bruno, 2004, p. 397). Teachers are regarded usually as their real mentors. This happens because they stay with teacher’s for long hours.

They copy what teachers do and how they execute various activities including their reaction to different issues (Maddi & Costa, 2008, p. 2). The theorists assume that teachers hold the capacity of shaping students’ behavior by directing their choices towards noble activities.

They also hold the capacity of directing them to success and making them understand obvious realities in life (Weissberg, 2010, p. 12).

On the aspect of description of obvious realities, the theorists believe that behavior is shaped exclusively through learning. Vaughn and Dacey (2003, p. 88), indicate that a responsible person who is morally upright can only be ascertained through his or her behavior and choice direction.

If a student is not respectful, obedient, and responsible, then such student has not received good teaching on obvious realities in life. Such a student can also be said to have failed the test of moral learning (DeRobertis, 1997, p. 6).

In particular, behaviorists affirm that raising students or children that are morally upright requires cognitive touch between learners and teachers or parents. They note that behavior among children is shaped through reward systems, spiritual guidance, teachers, good friends and emulation of stars.

These aspects explain why choice direction and description of realities of life are behavior development strategies that are dependent on the behavior of the mentor.

Particularly, giving good directions that economically and socially viable should be undertaken by individuals with noble behavior and character. This is essential in making learning process more positive and relevant to students (Kieffer, 2010, p. 24).

It is also meant to make learning process be of quality and ensure that students are nurtured with right values. Consequently, the description of obvious realities should be done in a behavioral manner.

Teachers on various life realities that are executed to build decision-making capacity of students must also be conducted in a sustainable manner (Lane, 2011, p. 23).

Notably, choice direction and description of obvious realities are behavior development strategies that present immense benefits to society members. The strategies provide requisite incentives that facilitate behavior nurturing especially among students (Sapp, 2010, p. 2).

Particularly, choice direction inculcates ability of quality choice making in individuals. It enables individuals, including students, to make accurate choices on who they relate to, including how they chose friends, career, and actions.

This makes them become more responsible and develop positive behaviors that enhance cohesion. Variably, choice direction and description of various realities enable students to understand that their choices and actions affect their status.

The strategies also enable them to understand that their actions have consequences that may either jeopardize their progress or guarantee their wellbeing in life (Greer, 2002, p. 3).

Further, they help in mentoring young people towards adoption of good and progressive behavior. This is evident since they facilitate identification and differentiation of what is good or bad.

Consequently, the strategies present negative aspects or limitations that must be addressed amicably (L’Abate, 2012, p. 6). The limitations may lead those people who are directed astray, especially if tenets of engagement are not based on moral ideals.

Firstly, the two strategies may make young individuals and students emulate bad behavior instead of good ones (Fouse & Wheeler, 1997, p. 5). This occurs due to the fact that the provision of guidance under these strategies is dependent on the behavior of the mentor and his or her beliefs.

If a mentor is of quality character and behavior, he or she will guide the student appropriately. However, if the mentor is of poor character, no best results can be expected.

Secondly, the strategies may also fail to facilitate equipment of students with noble human and spiritual values that are ideal for successful lifestyle.

These strategies have been instrumental in shaping behavior of various students and other individuals globally (Kail, 2007, p. 9). This depicts how positive their outcome has been over the years and in areas where they have been adopted.

Most teachers affirm that choice direction and description of obvious realities remain effective behavior development. They note that most students have been beneficiaries of these strategies.

They have enabled them to develop noble qualities that appertain to decision-making that is vital in improving life (Novak & Peáez, 2004, p. 21).

The strategies have also enabled students to change their unbecoming behaviors that include bullying of inferior ones, being disobedient, and involving in strikes or social unrests.

Similarly, the strategies have enabled such students to understand that their success is dependent on the decisions that they undertake. They have also been able to understand that unjustified decisions leads to destruction while, quality decisions guarantees good life.

Young people should be able to embrace each other and understand each other’s social, economic and cultural needs.

This is vital in facilitating systematic inculcation of moral behaviors, development of a sense of responsibility and advancement of ethical principles. These elements are pertinent for growth.

Indeed, the two identified behavior development strategies are bound to present immense benefits to students and society members. This is apparent since the strategies provide requisite incentives that facilitate behavior nurturing especially among students.

Particularly, a choice direction is bound to inculcate immense ability of quality choice making in individuals. It will enable individuals including students to make accurate choices on who they relate to, friends, career, and actions.

Variably, choice direction and description of various realities will enable students to understand that their choices and actions affect their status in life.

The strategies will also help in mentoring young people towards the adoption of good and progressive behaviors. Therefore, it is recommended that key stakeholders in the education sector, which includes teachers and parents, should join in order to strive to implement these strategies.

Firstly, they should initiate constructive dialogue with the students to enable them to develop themselves as responsible people. They should also nurture students in the right way of life. Similarly, they should teach moral values and principles that define good life.

Appleton-Knapp, S. & Krentler, K. A. (2006). Measuring student expectations and their effects on satisfaction: The importance of managing student expectations. Journal of Marketing Education, 28 (3), 254-264.

Bernardi, R. A., Metzger, L & Scofield Bruno, G. (2004). Examining the decision process of students’ cheating behavior: An empirical study. Journal of Business Ethics, 50 (4), 397-414.

Case, J. N. (2007). An exploratory study of school climate and student behavior in thirteen Delaware public elementary schools .

DeRobertis, E. M. (1997). Humanizing child developmental theory: A holistic approach . New York: iUniverse, Inc.

Department of Education, Training and Employment, (DETE). (2009). Supporting and managing children’s behavior: An Early Childhood Support. Adelaide: DETE. 2 (3), 1-96.

Fouse, B., & Wheeler, M. (1997). A treasure chest of behavioral strategies for individuals with autism . Arlington, TX: Future Horizons.

Greer, R. D. (2002). Designing teaching strategies: An applied behavior analysis systems approach . Amsterdam: Academic Press.

Jetha, M. K. (2012). Adolescent brain development: Implications for behavior . San Diego: Elsevier Academic Press.

Kail, R. V. (2007). Advances in child development and behavior: Volume 35 . Amsterdam: Elsevier Academic Press.

Kieffer, C. (2010). Bully court: Guntown students to judge behavior of peers. McClatchy – Tribune Business News . 3 (2), 24-36.

Lane, K. L. (2011). Managing challenging behaviors in schools: Research-based strategies that work . New York: Guilford Press.

L’Abate, L. (2012). Paradigms in theory construction . New York, NY: Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.

Maddi, S. R., & Costa, P. T. (2008). Humanism in personology: Allport, Maslow, and Murray . New Brunswick, N.J: AldineTransaction.

Novak, G., & Peáez, M. B. (2004). Child and adolescent development: A behavioral systems approach . Thousand Oaks, CA [etc.: Sage Publications.

Paton, G. (2012). ‘ Bad behaviour in schools ‘fuelled by over-indulgent parents ‘. Web.

Sapp, M. (2010). Psychodynamic, affective, and behavioral theories to psychotherapy . Springfield: Charles C Thomas Publisher, Ltd.

Vaughn, L., & Dacey, A. (2003). The case for humanism: An introduction . Lanham, Md: Rowman & Littlefield.

Weissberg, R. (2010). Bad students, not bad schools . New Brunswick, Transaction. Web.

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Greater Good Science Center • Magazine • In Action • In Education

Why Do People Do Bad Things?

The re-emergence of Neo-Nazi ideology; crowd-funded humanitarian aid; mass shootings with no apparent motive; rescue missions for domestic animals on hurricane-ravaged islands. These stories give us insight into the spectrum of human interactions.

But how can the human brain author such a wide swath of behavior? How can the same structure that gave us rhythm and blues also bring us waterboarding? And how can the single brain of one individual both “love thy neighbor” and “hate thy enemy” so vigorously?

In biologist Robert Sapolsky ’s newest book, Behave , we approach some answers to these thorny questions. Deftly synthesizing research from neurobiology, social psychology, cognitive science, and sociology, Sapolsky provides a comprehensive look at why we behave the way we do, making connections between our individual behavioral tendencies and our larger societal problems. A monumental tour of human behavior, this 800-page book outlines the forces that shape our best and worst selves.

The roots of our worst behaviors

Much of Behave looks at how biology and psychology govern human action within different time frames: seconds before an action (neuroanatomy and endocrinology), seconds to minutes before an action (subliminal and unconscious cueing), and days or months before an action (memory and neuronal plasticity). This organizing theme runs throughout the book and is used to explain everything from power dynamics to social inequality to racism.

Take prejudice, for example. Studies have shown that we are born with the propensity to notice difference in others, to be cautious around people we don’t instantly recognize as belonging to our local group. And there are automatic, “biological” sources of many of these behaviors: At some level , this is the product of chemistry at work very deep within our highly evolved brains, wired to react when we sense an “other.”

It is also true that these mental responses can be tuned by cues in our environment, which happens largely unconsciously. How we perceive a stranger is profoundly influenced by the manner in which we are raised, the people we are exposed to, and the things we are taught. For example, Sapolsky cites a study in which white participants were more accepting of social inequalities after being primed with the idea that race is essential and fixed, and less accepting when primed with the notion that race is a social construct with no genetic basis.

Sapolsky brilliantly weaves together research like this to explain many types of human behavior. In writing about the science of xenophobia (“us versus them”), and about the forces that create and maintain power dynamics, for example, he explains how our quest to protect members of our in-group can conflict with modern cultural values around equality, creating the current tensions around discrimination, segregation, and racial profiling.

“In-group parochialism is often more concerned about Us beating Them than with Us simply doing well,” he writes. “This is the essence of tolerating inequality in the name of loyalty.” 

This paradigm manifests across the world and especially in the political realm, where a politicians’ success is often dictated by the ability to prime a group of supporters to the similarities between him and them, rather than their differences (especially when the differences between a candidate and his base are objectively vast on a measure like income).

“Humans are fragile, capable of much on all ends of the moral spectrum”

Having tackled why human beings choose to place some people in the “us” camp and others with the “thems,” Sapolsky then illustrates how our tendency to notice differences manifests in social hierarchies that can appear incorrigible. He starts with studies performed in species closely related to humans—baboons, monkeys, and chimpanzees. For one, many species don’t think about “pecking order” in a binary sense (you’re below me or above me), but in a more graded sense—for example, baboons interact differently with the guy one step above them in rank than the one five steps below.

While many of these revealing studies of baboons or chimpanzees cannot be directly applied to humans, Sapolsky points to some of the very best research done with humans, effectively bridging what we’ve learned from related species. He shows that brain evolution is related to our social needs and that, across primate species, the size of the average social group is strongly linked to the size of the brain . Even within human beings, this is true , so that “the larger the size of someone’s social network (often calculated by the number of email/texting relationships), the larger the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, orbital prefrontal cortex, and amygdala.”

Findings like these help us understand the particular importance of our social connections and why we value our social status so much. But Sapolsky is less interested in explaining why humans are aware of social status than in demonstrating the nefarious ways that we are manipulated into maintaining our status.

For example, we tend to support some social hierarchies and rebel against others, in part due to the neurobiology of disgust, which is ruled by our sense of smell and a brain area called the insular cortex. Things that disgust us tend to invoke fear, and make us inclined to reach out for our loved ones, property, and way of life, and to hold on to them tightly, even violently. In fact, based on several studies, Sapolsky shows that feelings of disgust are related to more conservative values , so that you can “stick subjects in a room with a smelly garbage can, and they become more socially conservative.” The book is full of several similarly pithy scientific findings and their relevance to our social lives.

How to bring out human goodness

Spelled out this way, these findings don’t seem to bode well for humans. We have evolved to support our immediate social groups, a tendency that can be easily manipulated into discriminatory behavior, especially at younger ages. The good news, according to Sapolsky, is that there are always individuals who resist the temptation to discriminate and won’t conform to harmful acts based on othering or hierarchy.

Throughout the book, he offers suggestions for how we might subvert social tendencies to conform and aim our behavior towards better social ends. For example, his advice to counter xenophobia includes ”emphasizing individuation and shared attributes , perspective taking, more benign dichotomies, learning hierarchical differences, and bringing people together on equal terms with shared goals.”

Shared Identity

How to encourage generosity by finding commonalities between people

Sapolsky’s attempt at intervention-advice doesn’t always succeed, which could leave the reader discouraged about the fate of human beings. The fact that there are so many “ghosts in the machine,” working in so many nefarious ways, is disquieting. And this is true even if that nefariousness can be positively hijacked, to unleash the best of our angels.


Yet Sapolsky provides some hope about how to steer ourselves toward better behavior.

If we accept that there will always be sides, it’s a non-trivial to-do list item to always be on the side of angels. Distrust essentialism. Keep in mind that what seems like rationality is often just rationalization, playing catch-up with subterranean forces that we never suspect. Focus on the larger, shared goals. Practice perspective taking. Individuate, individuate, individuate. Recall the historical lessons of how often the truly malignant Thems keep themselves hidden and make third parties the fall guy.

Importantly, Sapolsky makes these points without the classical hubris of a know-it-all neurobiologist talking down to social scientists, which makes his arguments digestible to non-scientists. At the same time, his book alerts basic scientists that their often mechanistic take on behavior can miss some things—namely, an appropriate understanding of how context shapes the biology of good and bad. 

As a basic scientist who studies biological evolution, I found Sapolsky’s approach convincing, and gravitated to his intrepid story of human behavior. And, as an African American who has engineered much of his social life around avoiding racism (personal and institutional)—the way I live, my politics, the manner in which I communicate, how and where I work—I find it somewhat sobering to learn that racist behavior is a manifestation of a cognitive quicksand that the species continues to fall into, the product of very essential, very real, very tractable biology. 

This doesn’t make racism inevitable, though, and surely doesn’t excuse it. In fact, Sapolsky’s mastery of the topic, and his emphasis on how context frames how and why we “other,” is evidence that humans can understand and change our behavior. We can treat bigotry and its troubling consequences for what they are: not inevitable, but an arbitrary manifestation of some human characteristics that can be tweaked and tuned by culture and understanding. 

This message is, in the end, the defining one of Behave : Humans are fragile, capable of much on all ends of the moral spectrum. Because we now understand more about ourselves than ever before, we are finally in a position to do more to bring out the best in all of us.

About the Author

C. Brandon Ogbunu

C. Brandon Ogbunu is currently an assistant professor at the University of Vermont. In 2018, he will join the tenure track faculty in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Brown University. His research interests reside at the intersection between evolutionary genetics, systems biology, and epidemiology. Follow him on Twitter @bigdata_kane .

You May Also Enjoy

A Study of Evil

The Egalitarian Brain

How to Stop the Racist in You

Why We’re Obsessed With Understanding Evil

Understanding Our New Racial Reality Starts with the Unconscious

What Does Prejudice Reveal About What It Means to be Human?

Home — Essay Samples — Life — Habits — 500-word on Behavior Change: Things I Would Like to Change about Myself

500-word on Behavior Change: Things I Would Like to Change About Myself

• Categories: Change Habits

About this sample

Words: 506 |

Published: Aug 16, 2019

Words: 506 | Page: 1 | 3 min read

Works Cited

• Oaten, M., & Cheng, K. (2006). Improved self-control: The benefits of a regular program of academic study. Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 28(1), 1-16. doi: 10.1207/s15324834basp2801_1
• Sirois, F. M., & Pychyl, T. A. (2013). Procrastination and the priority of short-term mood regulation: Consequences for future self. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 7(2), 115-127. doi: 10.1111/spc3.12011
• Eisenberg, D. M., Kaptchuk, T. J., Post, D. E., Hrbek, A. L., O’Connor, B. B., Osypiuk, K., … & Buring, J. E. (2010). Establishing an integrative medicine program within an academic health center: Essential considerations. Academic Medicine, 85(3), 338-343. doi: 10.1097/ACM.0b013e3181ccc24a
• Bandura, A. (1991). Social cognitive theory of self-regulation. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 50(2), 248-287. doi: 10.1016/0749-5978(91)90022-L
• Gollwitzer, P. M., & Sheeran, P. (2006). Implementation intentions and goal achievement: A meta‐analysis of effects and processes. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 38, 69-119. doi: 10.1016/S0065-2601(06)38002-1
• Baumeister, R. F., Gailliot, M., DeWall, C. N., & Oaten, M. (2006). Self-regulation and personality: How interventions increase regulatory success, and how depletion moderates the effects of traits on behavior. Journal of Personality, 74(6), 1773-1801. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-6494.2006.00428.x
• Duckworth, A. L., & Seligman, M. E. P. (2005). Self-discipline outdoes IQ in predicting academic performance of adolescents. Psychological Science, 16(12), 939-944. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2005.01641.x
• Tice, D. M., Baumeister, R. F., Shmueli, D., & Muraven, M. (2007). Restoring the self: Positive affect helps improve self-regulation following ego depletion. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 43(3), 379-384. doi: 10.1016/j.jesp.2006.05.007
• Hagger, M. S., Wood, C., Stiff, C., & Chatzisarantis, N. L. D. (2010). Ego depletion and the strength model of self-control: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 136(4), 495-525. doi: 10.1037/a0019486

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CommonLit 360 “The Art of Suspense”: A Thematic Story Unit from CommonLit 360 that Will Spark Incredible Discussions In the Beginning of 8th Grade

Olivia Franklin

This ELA Unit includes high-interest stories about moral dilemmas and distinguishing right from wrong from authors like Roald Dahl and Richard Matheson.

What is commonlit 360.

CommonLit 360 is a free English Language Arts curriculum for grades 6-12 that includes content-rich units and compelling texts. Each fully-built out unit integrates reading, writing, listening, and speaking lessons. It is easy for teachers to use, with clear facilitation tips, actionable assessments, and ready-made tools to support differentiation.

Why Unit 1 Is Perfect for Back to School

The first unit in 8th grade is called “The Art of Suspense . ” This unit is anchored around seven engaging texts that depict characters struggling between right and wrong, including characters who willingly make immoral decisions by reasoning that the end result justifies their bad behavior. Students also engage in a nonfiction text to help them further engage with the short stories. As students progress through this unit, they will answer the Essential Question: “How do authors create suspense, and why are we drawn to it?”

This unit engages students by encouraging them to voice their personal opinions through collaborative class discussions. The short stories open students’ eyes to the nuances of the universal debate over what is right and wrong.

The Core Texts in This Unit

• “ Button, Button ” by Richard Matheson: a short story about a couple faced with a mysterious and tempting offer that forces them to choose between their own happiness and greed and someone else’s life. This text will also help students understand how authors build suspense through different points of view
• “ Lamb to the Slaughter ” by Roald Dahl: a story about how one woman reacts to her husband’s shocking betrayal and then decides to cover her tracks in an unexpected way that will show how authors build suspense through drama and irony
• “ Ruthless ” by William DeMille: a short story about a vindictive man’s plan for revenge featuring a shocking twist ending that will help students analyze how point of view and situational irony are used to affect readers
• “ Lather and Nothing Else ” by Hernando Téllez: a short story about a barber’s internal conflict who struggles to decide between taking revenge and maintaining his integrity as he shaves the beard of a cruel officer
• “ The Tell-Tale Heart ” by Edgar Allan Poe: a classic short story where a man tells the tale of a terrible act he committed as he struggles to maintain his sanity
• “ The Cone ” by H.G. Wells: a short story about an ironworks manager that gives his friend a tour of his company shortly after discovering an enracing secret
• “ The Psychology of Suspense ” by R.J. Jacobs: a nonfiction text about people’s contrasting attitudes toward suspense

These compelling and engaging fictional texts allow students to consider the experiences and events that lead people from childhood to adulthood. There is also an informational text about the three levels of moral development to help students gain background knowledge.

Unit 1 Is a Driver for Student Success

In this unit, students will learn about how theme is developed, how dialogue and events propel action, reveal character, or provoke a decision, and how different points of view create dramatic irony and suspense.

This unit also includes incredible writing lessons that are grade-level appropriate and rigorous. Meanwhile, these lessons are effectively scaffolded for students so that they can meet the end of unit goals and outcomes. As a former teacher, I know how difficult it is to teach writing. CommonLit’s writing lessons are laid out in a way that sets teachers up for success. Each CommonLit 360 unit gives teachers all the steps they need to get students to meet end of unit goals that will accelerate their writing success. Through carefully scaffolded lessons, students will practice writing a strong claim and complete paragraphs with relevant evidence and reasoning.

By the end of the unit, students will plan and write a full literary analysis essay that includes paragraphs with strong argument statements and complete introduction and conclusion paragraphs. This is a key skill for 8th graders! Future units built on this skill. If students can master this skill in Unit 1, they will be ready to move on to Unit 2 of the 360 Curriculum, where they will be asked to improve upon their literary analysis writing skills by backing their clear arguments with contextualized evidence and strong explanations. Unit 2 is called “Courageous Choices,” making it a perfect complement that is thematically connected to Unit 1.

Students will love the Discussion Lesson , where students answer the following question: “Who is more to blame for Arthur’s death in ‘Button, Button’: Noma or Mr. Steward?” These discussion lessons will help students hone their speaking and listening skills, practicing referring to evidence in discussion to build on or challenge others’ ideas. There are many opportunities for informal discussion, but this formal whole class discussion will help students be set up for success for future classroom discussions critical in 8th grade and into high school.

One of the most engaging lessons in this unit is the Related Media Exploration . In this thought-provoking lesson, students will work with their peers to examine how filmmakers create suspense in film. This lesson allows students to hone their discussion skills while also relating suspense in film to how authors create suspense.

Additionally, the unit also includes:

• A book club guide
• Vocabulary and grammar lessons
• Diagnostic, formative, and end-of-unit assessments

How Unit 1 Drives Teacher Success

CommonLit 360 provides a wealth of tools that will make the beginning of the year a breeze. Each comprehensive unit is set up for teachers and includes everything from fully-fleshed out lesson plans to vocabulary quizzes to discussion prompts and more. If your school purchases our School Essentials PRO package , you can access our Professional Development Portal . These self-paced tutorials are specifically designed to help teachers utilize all CommonLit 360 has to offer in their classroom.

Additionally, digital grading and feedback tools, interactive reading and writing lessons, and data tracking can save you hours previously spent on planning and grading. Working within contract hours will no longer be an unattainable pipe dream, and you can use the extra time to continue to focus on relationship building in your classroom.

Sign up for a CommonLit 360 webinar to get a comprehensive overview of how the curriculum works and how to use the digital platform.

Interested in gaining access to live and on-demand professional development that will help your team take full advantage of CommonLit 360?

Chat with CommonLit

CommonLit’s team will reach out with more information on our school and district partnerships.

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Bad College Essays: 10 Mistakes You Must Avoid

College Essays

Just as there are noteworthy examples of excellent college essays that admissions offices like to publish, so are there cringe-worthy examples of terrible college essays that end up being described by anonymous admissions officers on Reddit discussion boards.

While I won't guarantee that your essay will end up in the first category, I will say that you follow my advice in this article, your essay most assuredly won't end up in the second. How do you avoid writing a bad admissions essay? Read on to find out what makes an essay bad and to learn which college essay topics to avoid. I'll also explain how to recognize bad college essays—and what to do to if you end up creating one by accident.

What Makes Bad College Essays Bad

What exactly happens to turn a college essay terrible? Just as great personal statements combine an unexpected topic with superb execution, flawed personal statements compound problematic subject matter with poor execution.

Problems With the Topic

The primary way to screw up a college essay is to flub what the essay is about or how you've decided to discuss a particular experience. Badly chosen essay content can easily create an essay that is off-putting in one of a number of ways I'll discuss in the next section.

The essay is the place to let the admissions office of your target college get to know your personality, character, and the talents and skills that aren't on your transcript. So if you start with a terrible topic, not only will you end up with a bad essay, but you risk ruining the good impression that the rest of your application makes.

Some bad topics show admissions officers that you don't have a good sense of judgment or maturity , which is a problem since they are building a class of college students who have to be able to handle independent life on campus.

Other bad topics suggest that you are a boring person , or someone who doesn't process your experience in a colorful or lively way, which is a problem since colleges want to create a dynamic and engaged cohort of students.

Still other bad topics indicate that you're unaware of or disconnected from the outside world and focused only on yourself , which is a problem since part of the point of college is to engage with new people and new ideas, and admissions officers are looking for people who can do that.

Problems With the Execution

Sometimes, even if the experiences you discuss could be the foundation of a great personal statement, the way you've structured and put together your essay sends up warning flags. This is because the admissions essay is also a place to show the admissions team the maturity and clarity of your writing style.

One way to get this part wrong is to exhibit very faulty writing mechanics , like unclear syntax or incorrectly used punctuation. This is a problem since college-ready writing is one of the things that's expected from a high school graduate.

Another way to mess this up is to ignore prompt instructions either for creative or careless reasons. This can show admissions officers that you're either someone who simply blows off directions and instructions or someone who can't understand how to follow them . Neither is a good thing, since they are looking for people who are open to receiving new information from professors and not just deciding they know everything already.

College Essay Topics To Avoid

Want to know why you're often advised to write about something mundane and everyday for your college essay? That's because the more out-there your topic, the more likely it is to stumble into one of these trouble categories.

Too Personal

The problem with the overly personal essay topic is that revealing something very private can show that you don't really understand boundaries . And knowing where appropriate boundaries are will be key for living on your own with a bunch of people not related to you.

Unfortunately, stumbling into the TMI zone of essay topics is more common than you think. One quick test for checking your privacy-breaking level: if it's not something you'd tell a friendly stranger sitting next to you on the plane, maybe don't tell it to the admissions office.

• Describing losing your virginity, or anything about your sex life really. This doesn't mean you can't write about your sexual orientation—just leave out the actual physical act.
• Writing in too much detail about your illness, disability, any other bodily functions. Detailed meaningful discussion of what this physical condition has meant to you and your life is a great thing to write about. But stay away from body horror and graphic descriptions that are simply there for gratuitous shock value.
• Waxing poetic about your love for your significant other. Your relationship is adorable to the people currently involved in it, but those who don't know you aren't invested in this aspect of your life.
• Confessing to odd and unusual desires of the sexual or illegal variety. Your obsession with cultivating cacti is wonderful topic, while your obsession with researching explosives is a terrible one.

Too Revealing of Bad Judgment

Generally speaking, leave past illegal or immoral actions out of your essay . It's simply a bad idea to give admissions officers ammunition to dislike you.

Some exceptions might be if you did something in a very, very different mindset from the one you're in now (in the midst of escaping from danger, under severe coercion, or when you were very young, for example). Or if your essay is about explaining how you've turned over a new leaf and you have the transcript to back you up.

• Writing about committing crime as something fun or exciting. Unless it's on your permanent record, and you'd like a chance to explain how you've learned your lesson and changed, don't put this in your essay.
• Describing drug use or the experience of being drunk or high. Even if you're in a state where some recreational drugs are legal, you're a high school student. Your only exposure to mind-altering substances should be caffeine.
• Making up fictional stories about yourself as though they are true. You're unlikely to be a good enough fantasist to pull this off, and there's no reason to roll the dice on being discovered to be a liar.
• Detailing your personality flaws. Unless you have a great story of coping with one of these, leave deal-breakers like pathological narcissism out of your personal statement.

Too Overconfident

While it's great to have faith in your abilities, no one likes a relentless show-off. No matter how magnificent your accomplishments, if you decide to focus your essay on them, it's better to describe a setback or a moment of doubt rather that simply praising yourself to the skies.

• Bragging and making yourself the flawless hero of your essay. This goes double if you're writing about not particularly exciting achievements like scoring the winning goal or getting the lead in the play.
• Having no awareness of the actual scope of your accomplishments. It's lovely that you take time to help others, but volunteer-tutoring a couple of hours a week doesn't make you a saintly figure.

Too Clichéd or Boring

Remember your reader. In this case, you're trying to make yourself memorable to an admissions officer who has been reading thousands of other essays . If your essay makes the mistake of being boring or trite, it just won't register in that person's mind as anything worth paying attention to.

• Transcribing your resume into sentence form or writing about the main activity on your transcript. The application already includes your resume, or a detailed list of your various activities. Unless the prompt specifically asks you to write about your main activity, the essay needs to be about a facet of your interests and personality that doesn't come through the other parts of the application.
• Writing about sports. Every athlete tries to write this essay. Unless you have a completely off-the-wall story or unusual achievement, leave this overdone topic be.
• Being moved by your community service trip to a third-world country. Were you were impressed at how happy the people seemed despite being poor? Did you learn a valuable lesson about how privileged you are? Unfortunately, so has every other teenager who traveled on one of these trips. Writing about this tends to simultaneously make you sound unempathetic, clueless about the world, way over-privileged, and condescending. Unless you have a highly specific, totally unusual story to tell, don't do it.
• Reacting with sadness to a sad, but very common experience. Unfortunately, many of the hard, formative events in your life are fairly universal. So, if you're going to write about death or divorce, make sure to focus on how you dealt with this event, so the essay is something only you could possibly have written. Only detailed, idiosyncratic description can save this topic.
• Going meta. Don't write about the fact that you're writing the essay as we speak, and now the reader is reading it, and look, the essay is right here in the reader's hand. It's a technique that seems clever, but has already been done many times in many different ways.
• Offering your ideas on how to fix the world. This is especially true if your solution is an easy fix, if only everyone would just listen to you. Trust me, there's just no way you are being realistically appreciative of the level of complexity inherent in the problem you're describing.
• Starting with a famous quotation. There usually is no need to shore up your own words by bringing in someone else's. Of course, if you are writing about a particular phrase that you've adopted as a life motto, feel free to include it. But even then, having it be the first line in your essay feels like you're handing the keys over to that author and asking them to drive.
• Using an everyday object as a metaphor for your life/personality. "Shoes. They are like this, and like that, and people love them for all of these reasons. And guess what? They are just like me."

Too Off-Topic

Unlike the essays you've been writing in school where the idea is to analyze something outside of yourself, the main subject of your college essay should be you, your background, your makeup, and your future . Writing about someone or something else might well make a great essay, but not for this context.

• Paying tribute to someone very important to you. Everyone would love to meet your grandma, but this isn't the time to focus on her amazing coming of age story. If you do want to talk about a person who is important to your life, dwell on the ways you've been impacted by them, and how you will incorporate this impact into your future.
• Documenting how well other people do things, say things, are active, while you remain passive and inactive in the essay. Being in the orbit of someone else's important lab work, or complex stage production, or meaningful political activism is a fantastic learning moment. But if you decide to write about, your essay should be about your learning and how you've been influenced, not about the other person's achievements.
• Concentrating on a work of art that deeply moved you. Watch out for the pitfall of writing an analytical essay about that work, and not at all about your reaction to it or how you've been affected since. Check out our explanation of how to answer Topic D of the ApplyTexas application to get some advice on writing about someone else's work while making sure your essay still points back at you.

(Image: Pieter Christoffel Wonder [Public domain] , via Wikimedia Commons)

Too Offensive

With this potential mistake, you run the risk of showing a lack of self-awareness or the ability to be open to new ideas . Remember, no reader wants to be lectured at. If that's what your essay does, you are demonstrating an inability to communicate successfully with others.

Also, remember that no college is eager to admit someone who is too close-minded to benefit from being taught by others. A long, one-sided essay about a hot-button issue will suggest that you are exactly that.

• Ranting at length about political, religious, or other contentious topics. You simply don't know where the admissions officer who reads your essay stands on any of these issues. It's better to avoid upsetting or angering that person.
• Writing a one-sided diatribe about guns, abortion, the death penalty, immigration, or anything else in the news. Even if you can marshal facts in your argument, this essay is simply the wrong place to take a narrow, unempathetic side in an ongoing debate.
• Mentioning anything negative about the school you're applying to. Again, your reader is someone who works there and presumably is proud of the place. This is not the time to question the admissions officer's opinions or life choices.

College Essay Execution Problems To Avoid

Bad college essays aren't only caused by bad topics. Sometimes, even if you're writing about an interesting, relevant topic, you can still seem immature or unready for college life because of the way you present that topic—the way you actually write your personal statement. Check to make sure you haven't made any of the common mistakes on this list.

Tone-Deafness

Admissions officers are looking for resourcefulness, the ability to be resilient, and an active and optimistic approach to life —these are all qualities that create a thriving college student. Essays that don't show these qualities are usually suffering from tone-deafness.

• Being whiny or complaining about problems in your life. Is the essay about everyone doing things to/against you? About things happening to you, rather than you doing anything about them? That perspective is a definite turn-off.
• Trying and failing to use humor. You may be very funny in real life, but it's hard to be successfully funny in this context, especially when writing for a reader who doesn't know you. If you do want to use humor, I'd recommend the simplest and most straightforward version: being self-deprecating and low-key.
• Talking down to the reader, or alternately being self-aggrandizing. No one enjoys being condescended to. In this case, much of the function of your essay is to charm and make yourself likable, which is unlikely to happen if you adopt this tone.
• Being pessimistic, cynical, and generally depressive. You are applying to college because you are looking forward to a future of learning, achievement, and self-actualization. This is not the time to bust out your existential ennui and your jaded, been-there-done-that attitude toward life.

(Image: Eduard Munch [Public Domain] , via Wikimedia Commons)

Lack of Personality

One good question to ask yourself is: could anyone else have written this essay ? If the answer is yes, then you aren't doing a good job of representing your unique perspective on the world. It's very important to demonstrate your ability to be a detailed observer of the world, since that will be one of your main jobs as a college student.

• Avoiding any emotions, and appearing robot-like and cold in the essay. Unlike essays that you've been writing for class, this essay is meant to be a showcase of your authorial voice and personality. It may seem strange to shift gears after learning how to take yourself out of your writing, but this is the place where you have to put as much as yourself in as possible.
• Skipping over description and specific details in favor of writing only in vague generalities. Does your narrative feel like a newspaper horoscope, which could apply to every other person who was there that day? Then you're doing it wrong and need to refocus on your reaction, feelings, understanding, and transformation.

Off-Kilter Style

There's some room for creativity here, yes, but a college essay isn't a free-for-all postmodern art class . True, there are prompts that specifically call for your most out-of-left-field submission, or allow you to submit a portfolio or some other work sample instead of a traditional essay. But on a standard application, it's better to stick to traditional prose, split into paragraphs, further split into sentences.

• Submitting anything other than just the materials asked for on your application. Don't send food to the admissions office, don't write your essay on clothing or shoes, don't create a YouTube channel about your undying commitment to the school. I know there are a lot of urban legends about "that one time this crazy thing worked," but they are either not true or about something that will not work a second time.
• Writing your essay in verse, in the form of a play, in bullet points, as an acrostic, or any other non-prose form. Unless you really have a way with poetry or playwriting, and you are very confident that you can meet the demands of the prompt and explain yourself well in this form, don't discard prose simply for the sake of being different.
• Using as many "fancy" words as possible and getting very far away from sounding like yourself. Admissions officers are unanimous in wanting to hear your not fully formed teenage voice in your essay. This means that you should write at the top of your vocabulary range and syntax complexity, but don't trade every word up for a thesaurus synonym. Your essay will suffer for it.

Failure to Proofread

Most people have a hard time checking over their own work. This is why you have to make sure that someone else proofreads your writing . This is the one place where you can, should—and really must—get someone who knows all about grammar, punctuation and has a good eye for detail to take a red pencil to your final draft.

Otherwise, you look like you either don't know the basic rules or writing (in which case, are you really ready for college work?) or don't care enough to present yourself well (in which case, why would the admissions people care about admitting you?).

• Typos, grammatical mistakes, punctuation flubs, weird font/paragraph spacing issues. It's true that these are often unintentional mistakes. But caring about getting it right is a way to demonstrate your work ethic and dedication to the task at hand.
• Going over the word limit. Part of showing your brilliance is being able to work within arbitrary rules and limitations. Going over the word count points to a lack of self-control, which is not a very attractive feature in a college applicant.
• Repeating the same word(s) or sentence structure over and over again. This makes your prose monotonous and hard to read.

Bad College Essay Examples—And How to Fix Them

The beauty of writing is that you get to rewrite. So if you think of your essay as a draft waiting to be revised into a better version rather than as a precious jewel that can't bear being touched, you'll be in far better shape to correct the issues that always crop up!

Now let's take a look at some actual college essay drafts to see where the writer is going wrong and how the issue could be fixed.

Essay #1: The "I Am Writing This Essay as We Speak" Meta-Narrative

Was your childhood home destroyed by a landspout tornado? Yeah, neither was mine. I know that intro might have given the impression that this college essay will be about withstanding disasters, but the truth is that it isn't about that at all.

In my junior year, I always had in mind an image of myself finishing the college essay months before the deadline. But as the weeks dragged on and the deadline drew near, it soon became clear that at the rate things are going I would probably have to make new plans for my October, November and December.

Falling into my personal wormhole, I sat down with my mom to talk about colleges. "Maybe you should write about Star Trek ," she suggested, "you know how you've always been obsessed with Captain Picard, calling him your dream mentor. Unique hobbies make good topics, right? You'll sound creative!" I played with the thought in my mind, tapping my imaginary communicator pin and whispering "Computer. Tea. Earl Grey. Hot. And then an Essay." Nothing happened. Instead, I sat quietly in my room wrote the old-fashioned way. Days later I emerged from my room disheveled, but to my dismay, this college essay made me sound like just a guy who can't get over the fact that he'll never take the Starfleet Academy entrance exam. So, I tossed my essay away without even getting to disintegrate it with a phaser set on stun.

I fell into a state of panic. My college essay. My image of myself in senior year. Almost out of nowhere, Robert Jameson Smith offered his words of advice. Perfect! He suggested students begin their college essay by listing their achievements and letting their essay materialize from there. My heart lifted, I took his advice and listed three of my greatest achievements - mastering my backgammon strategy, being a part of TREE in my sophomore year, and performing "I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General" from The Pirates of Penzance in public. And sure enough, I felt inspiration hit me and began to type away furiously into the keyboard about my experience in TREE, or Trees Require Engaged Environmentalists. I reflected on the current state of deforestation, and described the dichotomy of it being both understandable why farmers cut down forests for farmland, and how dangerous this is to our planet. Finally, I added my personal epiphany to the end of my college essay as the cherry on the vanilla sundae, as the overused saying goes.

After 3 weeks of figuring myself out, I have converted myself into a piece of writing. As far as achievements go, this was definitely an amazing one. The ability to transform a human being into 603 words surely deserves a gold medal. Yet in this essay, I was still being nagged by a voice that couldn't be ignored. Eventually, I submitted to that yelling inner voice and decided that this was not the right essay either.

In the middle of a hike through Philadelphia's Fairmount Park, I realized that the college essay was nothing more than an embodiment of my character. The two essays I have written were not right because they have failed to become more than just words on recycled paper. The subject failed to come alive. Certainly my keen interest in Star Trek and my enthusiasm for TREE are a great part of who I am, but there were other qualities essential in my character that did not come across in the essays.

With this realization, I turned around as quickly as I could without crashing into a tree.

What Essay #1 Does Well

Here are all things that are working on all cylinders for this personal statement as is.

Killer First Sentence

Was your childhood home destroyed by a landspout tornado? Yeah, neither was mine.

• A strange fact. There are different kinds of tornadoes? What is a "landspout tornado" anyway?
• A late-night-deep-thoughts hypothetical. What would it be like to be a kid whose house was destroyed in this unusual way?
• Direct engagement with the reader. Instead of asking "what would it be like to have a tornado destroy a house" it asks "was your house ever destroyed."

Gentle, Self-Deprecating Humor That Lands Well

I played with the thought in my mind, tapping my imaginary communicator pin and whispering "Computer. Tea. Earl Grey. Hot. And then an Essay." Nothing happened. Instead, I sat quietly in my room wrote the old-fashioned way. Days later I emerged from my room disheveled, but to my dismay, this college essay made me sound like just a guy who can't get over the fact that he'll never take the Starfleet Academy entrance exam. So, I tossed my essay away without even getting to disintegrate it with a phaser set on stun.

The author has his cake and eats it too here: both making fun of himself for being super into the Star Trek mythos, but also showing himself being committed enough to try whispering a command to the Enterprise computer alone in his room. You know, just in case.

A Solid Point That Is Made Paragraph by Paragraph

The meat of the essay is that the two versions of himself that the author thought about portraying each fails in some way to describe the real him. Neither an essay focusing on his off-beat interests, nor an essay devoted to his serious activism could capture everything about a well-rounded person in 600 words.

(Image: fir0002 via Wikimedia Commons .)

Where Essay #1 Needs Revision

Rewriting these flawed parts will make the essay shine.

Spending Way Too Long on the Metanarrative

I know that intro might have given the impression that this college essay will be about withstanding disasters, but the truth is that it isn't about that at all.

After 3 weeks of figuring myself out, I have converted myself into a piece of writing. As far as achievements go, this was definitely an amazing one. The ability to transform a human being into 603 words surely deserves a gold medal.

Look at how long and draggy these paragraphs are, especially after that zippy opening. Is it at all interesting to read about how someone else found the process of writing hard? Not really, because this is a very common experience.

In the rewrite, I'd advise condensing all of this to maybe a sentence to get to the meat of the actual essay .

Letting Other People Do All the Doing

I sat down with my mom to talk about colleges. "Maybe you should write about Star Trek ," she suggested, "you know how you've always been obsessed with Captain Picard, calling him your dream mentor. Unique hobbies make good topics, right? You'll sound creative!"

Almost out of nowhere, Robert Jameson Smith offered his words of advice. Perfect! He suggested students begin their college essay by listing their achievements and letting their essay materialize from there.

Twice in the essay, the author lets someone else tell him what to do. Not only that, but it sounds like both of the "incomplete" essays were dictated by the thoughts of other people and had little to do with his own ideas, experiences, or initiative.

In the rewrite, it would be better to recast both the Star Trek and the TREE versions of the essay as the author's own thoughts rather than someone else's suggestions . This way, the point of the essay—taking apart the idea that a college essay could summarize life experience—is earned by the author's two failed attempts to write that other kind of essay.

Leaving the Insight and Meaning Out of His Experiences

Both the Star Trek fandom and the TREE activism were obviously important life experiences for this author—important enough to be potential college essay topic candidates. But there is no description of what the author did with either one, nor any explanation of why these were so meaningful to his life.

It's fine to say that none of your achievements individually define you, but in order for that to work, you have to really sell the achievements themselves.

In the rewrite, it would be good to explore what he learned about himself and the world by pursuing these interests . How did they change him or seen him into the person he is today?

Not Adding New Shades and Facets of Himself Into the Mix

So, I tossed my essay away without even getting to disintegrate it with a phaser set on stun.

Yet in this essay, I was still being nagged by a voice that couldn't be ignored. Eventually, I submitted to that yelling inner voice and decided that this was not the right essay either.

In both of these passages, there is the perfect opportunity to point out what exactly these failed versions of the essay didn't capture about the author . In the next essay draft, I would suggest subtly making a point about his other qualities.

For example, after the Star Trek paragraph, he could talk about other culture he likes to consume, especially if he can discuss art forms he is interested in that would not be expected from someone who loves Star Trek .

Or, after the TREE paragraph, the author could explain why this second essay was no better at capturing him than the first. What was missing? Why is the self in the essay shouting—is it because this version paints him as an overly aggressive activist?

Essay #2: The "I Once Saw Poor People" Service Trip Essay

Unlike other teenagers, I'm not concerned about money, or partying, or what others think of me. Unlike other eighteen year-olds, I think about my future, and haven't become totally materialistic and acquisitive. My whole outlook on life changed after I realized that my life was just being handed to me on a silver spoon, and yet there were those in the world who didn't have enough food to eat or place to live. I realized that the one thing that this world needed more than anything was compassion; compassion for those less fortunate than us.

During the summer of 2006, I went on a community service trip to rural Peru to help build an elementary school for kids there. I expected harsh conditions, but what I encountered was far worse. It was one thing to watch commercials asking for donations to help the unfortunate people in less developed countries, yet it was a whole different story to actually live it. Even after all this time, I can still hear babies crying from hunger; I can still see the filthy rags that they wore; I can still smell the stench of misery and hopelessness. But my most vivid memory was the moment I first got to the farming town. The conditions of it hit me by surprise; it looked much worse in real life than compared to the what our group leader had told us. Poverty to me and everyone else I knew was a foreign concept that people hear about on the news or see in documentaries. But this abject poverty was their life, their reality. And for the brief ten days I was there, it would be mine too. As all of this realization came at once, I felt overwhelmed by the weight of what was to come. Would I be able to live in the same conditions as these people? Would I catch a disease that no longer existed in the first world, or maybe die from drinking contaminated water? As these questions rolled around my already dazed mind, I heard a soft voice asking me in Spanish, "Are you okay? Is there anything I can do to make you feel better?" I looked down to see a small boy, around nine years of age, who looked starved, and cold, wearing tattered clothing, comforting me. These people who have so little were able to forget their own needs, and put those much more fortunate ahead of themselves. It was at that moment that I saw how selfish I had been. How many people suffered like this in the world, while I went about life concerned about nothing at all?

Thinking back on the trip, maybe I made a difference, maybe not. But I gained something much more important. I gained the desire to make the world a better place for others. It was in a small, poverty-stricken village in Peru that I finally realized that there was more to life than just being alive.

What Essay #2 Does Well

Let's first point out what this draft has going for it.

Clear Chronology

This is an essay that tries to explain a shift in perspective. There are different ways to structure this overarching idea, but a chronological approach that starts with an earlier opinion, describes a mind changing event, and ends with the transformed point of view is an easy and clear way to lay this potentially complex subject out.

(Image: User:Lite via Wikimedia Commons)

Where Essay #2 Needs Revision

Now let's see what needs to be changed in order for this essay to pass muster.

Condescending, Obnoxious Tone

Unlike other teenagers, I'm not concerned about money, or partying, or what others think of me. Unlike other eighteen year-olds, I think about my future, and haven't become totally materialistic and acquisitive.

This is a very broad generalization, which doesn't tend to be the best way to formulate an argument—or to start an essay. It just makes this author sound dismissive of a huge swath of the population.

In the rewrite, this author would be way better off just concentrate on what she want to say about herself, not pass judgment on "other teenagers," most of whom she doesn't know and will never meet.

I realized that the one thing that this world needed more than anything was compassion; compassion for those less fortunate than us.

Coming from someone who hasn't earned her place in the world through anything but the luck of being born, the word "compassion" sounds really condescending. Calling others "less fortunate" when you're a senior in high school has a dehumanizing quality to it.

These people who have so little were able to forget their own needs, and put those much more fortunate in front of themselves.

Again, this comes across as very patronizing. Not only that, but to this little boy the author was clearly not looking all that "fortunate"—instead, she looked pathetic enough to need comforting.

In the next draft, a better hook could be making the essay about the many different kinds of shifting perspectives the author encountered on that trip . A more meaningful essay would compare and contrast the points of view of the TV commercials, to what the group leader said, to the author's own expectations, and finally to this child's point of view.

Vague, Unobservant Description

During the summer of 2006, I went on a community service trip to rural Peru to help build an elementary school for kids there. I expected harsh conditions, but what I encountered was far worse. It was one thing to watch commercials asking for donations to help the unfortunate people in less developed countries, yet it was a whole different story to actually live it. Even after all this time, I can still hear babies crying from hunger; I can still see the filthy rags that they wore; I can still smell the stench of misery and hopelessness.

Phrases like "cries of the small children from not having enough to eat" and "dirt stained rags" seem like descriptions, but they're really closer to incurious and completely hackneyed generalizations. Why were the kids were crying? How many kids? All the kids? One specific really loud kid?

The same goes for "filthy rags," which is both an incredibly insensitive way to talk about the clothing of these villagers, and again shows a total lack of interest in their life. Why were their clothes dirty? Were they workers or farmers so their clothes showing marks of labor? Did they have Sunday clothes? Traditional clothes they would put on for special occasions? Did they make their own clothes? That would be a good reason to keep wearing clothing even if it had "stains" on it.

The rewrite should either make this section more specific and less reliant on cliches, or should discard it altogether .

The conditions of it hit me by surprise; it looked much worse in real life than compared to the what our group leader had told us. Poverty to me and everyone else I knew was a foreign concept that people hear about on the news or see in documentaries. But this abject poverty was their life, their reality.

If this is the "most vivid memory," then I would expect to read all the details that have been seared into the author's brain. What did their leader tell them? What was different in real life? What was the light like? What did the houses/roads/grass/fields/trees/animals/cars look like? What time of day was it? Did they get there by bus, train, or plane? Was there an airport/train station/bus terminal? A city center? Shops? A marketplace?

There are any number of details to include here when doing another drafting pass.

Lack of Insight or Maturity

But this abject poverty was their life, their reality. And for the brief ten days I was there, it would be mine too. As all of this realization came at once, I felt overwhelmed by the weight of what was to come. Would I be able to live in the same conditions as these people? Would I catch a disease that no longer existed in the first world, or maybe die from drinking contaminated water?

Without a framing device explaining that this initial panic was an overreaction, this section just makes the author sound whiny, entitled, melodramatic, and immature . After all, this isn't a a solo wilderness trek—the author is there with a paid guided program. Just how much mortality is typically associated with these very standard college-application-boosting service trips?

In a rewrite, I would suggest including more perspective on the author's outsized and overprivileged response here. This would fit well with a new focus on the different points of view on this village the author encountered.

Unearned, Clichéd "Deep Thoughts"

But I gained something much more important. I gained the desire to make the world a better place for others. It was in a small, poverty-stricken village in Peru that I finally realized that there was more to life than just being alive.

Is it really believable that this is what the author learned? There is maybe some evidence to suggest that the author was shaken somewhat out of a comfortable, materialistic existence. But what does "there is more to life than just being alive" even really mean? This conclusion is rather vague, and seems mostly a non sequitur.

In a rewrite, the essay should be completely reoriented to discuss how differently others see us than we see ourselves, pivoting on the experience of being pitied by someone who you thought was pitiable. Then, the new version can end by on a note of being better able to understand different points of view and other people's perspectives .

The Bottom Line

• Bad college essays have problems either with their topics or their execution.
• The essay is how admissions officers learn about your personality, point of view, and maturity level, so getting the topic right is a key factor in letting them see you as an aware, self-directed, open-minded applicant who is going to thrive in an environment of independence.
• The essay is also how admissions officers learn that you are writing at a ready-for-college level, so screwing up the execution shows that you either don't know how to write, or don't care enough to do it well.
• The main ways college essay topics go wrong is bad taste, bad judgment, and lack of self-awareness.
• The main ways college essays fail in their execution have to do with ignoring format, syntax, and genre expectations.

What's Next?

Want to read some excellent college essays now that you've seen some examples of flawed one? Take a look through our roundup of college essay examples published by colleges and then get help with brainstorming your perfect college essay topic .

Need some guidance on other parts of the application process? Check out our detailed, step-by-step guide to college applications for advice.

Are you considering taking the SAT or ACT again before you submit your application? Read about our famous test prep guides for hints and strategies for a better score.

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Anna scored in the 99th percentile on her SATs in high school, and went on to major in English at Princeton and to get her doctorate in English Literature at Columbia. She is passionate about improving student access to higher education.

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Was I Capable of Killing My Cat for Bad Behavior?

That i would consider doing this revealed me to myself in a way that still gives me pause..

One day in 1991, I thought about taking my healthy six-year-old cat to the ASPCA, where she would almost certainly have been “put down,” a.k.a. killed. I had adopted Suki when she was six months old and lived with her lovingly until a dramatic upheaval caused us to be (almost literally) at each other’s throats. After nearly two months of animosity, I’d reached a breaking point: She would have to go. That I would seriously consider doing this to a beloved pet revealed me to myself in a way that still gives me pause. It is remarkable how a relationship with an animal can do that.

I grew up having cats as pets, but I didn’t really own one as an adult until the age of 30; my circumstances were too unstable, and the few attempts I’d made as a teenager to adopt the cats that had shown up in my life didn’t end well. When I moved to Manhattan in my 20s and finally found a place to live, it was a tiny studio that I deemed too small for a cat to live in with any satisfaction. It would be, I thought, unfair to put an animal in that situation.

But then this cat showed up. One day in the spring of ’85, I was walking down 8th Street when I heard loud meowing — to my surprise, it seemed to be coming from a parked car surrounded by a small crowd of people who were looking under the body and the hood. As I came closer, someone said, “There it is!” before pulling from deep under the hood a limp, very shocked, loudly crying adolescent tabby cat. Because the driver of the car had no idea where the little cat had come from, because no one else volunteered, and because I lived close by, I offered to provide her with temporary shelter (plus vet care; her paws were burned) and find her a home. But the latter proved near impossible, and during the time it took to realize that, Suki and I had bonded. She was wonderfully intelligent, full of energy and play but also tenderness and desire for affection. And she seemed to be very comfortable in my studio.

In This Issue

Is my cat a prisoner.

Still, I adopted her with reservations in part because of my strange schedule; I often worked a graveyard shift that sometimes lasted 12 hours, and I couldn’t afford to turn down the work when it came. On the flip side, because the job was freelance, I would get several days off at a time. I thought it could work out.

And it did, sort of. When I could be there for her, Suki was happy enough — but as she grew bigger, the small space chafed, particularly during those long shifts. I would sometimes come home too exhausted to play with her for longer than 20 minutes or so, then lie in bed trying to sleep while she rocketed around the room and over my body, knocking stuff down, batting at my nose until I was so aggravated that I got up and yelled at her, then tossed her in the bathroom and closed the door.

To give her some variety, I let her roam in the hall when the super wasn’t around and tried taking her out for walks in a harness that she didn’t like. It was stressful, and I felt real guilt about frustrating her natural wants. One particularly awful time, I was especially desperate to sleep and she was especially desperate to charge around the room; I so lost my temper that I actually slapped her, causing her to race up into the space above my closet to hide. I got back into bed but couldn’t sleep because I felt wretched for hitting her. My wretchedness lasted for maybe five minutes before Suki came blasting down from her perch, charged back and forth over me, knocked something down, then jumped up on the bed, batted my nose and looked at me like, “Bitch, what are you gonna do about it?” I felt such admiration and delight that I laughed! I petted her, let her play with and bite my hand a little; after that, I guess she’d blown off enough steam to sleep because she lay down next to me as usual.

While it was rocky at times, there was respect and affection; we gave each other happiness. But it also felt like we were in an ongoing, often tense negotiation with each other regarding space and need. In this negotiation I certainly had the most power. But it would be a mistake to say that Suki, a remarkably strong-willed little creature, had none. I’m thinking of the time when I was so sick that I couldn’t get out of bed except to feed Suki or use the bathroom; during that time, she did not run around the room or swat my nose even once. She stayed next to me — until one morning when she sniffed me, realized the fever had broken, and smacked my nose, meaning, “Okay, ass out of bed.”

In 1987, I sold my first book, and we later moved to Marin County in California. The place was an in-law cottage that looked like a renovated barn. It was located in a beautiful canyon. It was at least three times as big as my studio had been, with sliding glass doors that opened onto a deck looking out into a ravine full of greenery and wildlife. Suki was very pleased — she made that plain with her ecstatic facial marking of every corner and her purring, full-bodied rubbing on my legs. I was cautious about letting her out at first, but when I finally did, her happiness was complete. Because I now worked at home, I was with her much more of the time, so in addition to the outdoors, she had more frequent playtimes with me. She no longer woke me up with frenetic racings around or attacked my nose. She also stopped getting the cystitis which had plagued her the entire four years we had lived in the Manhattan studio.

It was lovely and then — I made a mistake.

I had been thinking about getting a kitten, wondering if it would make Suki even happier or … not. Then one serendipitous afternoon, a woman walked up to me on the street with a cardboard box. She said she had found a kitten on the side of the road and couldn’t adopt it: Did I want it? This was obviously a sign! I brought the kitten — a tiny orange male — home on the spot.

Suki took one look at the newcomer and hated him. She never hurt the kitten, whom I named Honus, but she cursed at and menaced him constantly, rising above him with one paw ready to strike. She cursed at and menaced me constantly, not even allowing me to touch her. I wasn’t shocked by this. But I expected her to calm down eventually. And she might have if she’d had more time. In a few weeks, I was due to leave town for a professional trip for nearly a month. In the week before I left, I was encouraged to see her show some curiosity toward Honus; she also softened toward me, letting me pet her a little. Feeling optimistic, I arranged for a pet sitter named Barbara to stay at the house during my absence.

It went wrong almost immediately. With every call home I made, the situation seemed to have gotten worse. “I’m afraid of Suki,” said Barbara. “I’m afraid to get out of bed in the morning—she’s circling the bed like a shark.” I found this description so bizarre that I decided Barbara must be at fault. Then Suki began attacking Barbara, swiping at her legs.

I was about to get an early ticket home when there was another development: Barbara woke one morning to find that Suki’s face was horribly swollen. My poor cat had a tooth infection, meaning she’d been in pain for some time and needed surgery. Suki had to spend at least a week at the vet prior to and after the procedure; by the time she was ready to come home, I was due to arrive in a matter of days. Barbara reported that on her return the cat was subdued and unfriendly but not especially aggressive. I was relieved; I was also confident that with the infection gone and me present, all would eventually be well.

And at first, that seemed possible. When she’d left, Barbara had let Suki out, and I started calling her as soon as I emerged from the taxi. I didn’t have to wait long before she came bounding out of the underbrush like Lassie, rubbing against me, almost leaping into my arms. But as soon as we entered the house and she saw Honus, she began snarling. I quickly set her down; she glared at me with pure animal rage and bolted out the door.

She did not come in again until mealtime, when she scarfed her food, snarled at me, snarled at Honus, and bolted out again. When she came back in for breakfast, I tried to sweet-talk her, by which I mean I attempted to sit with her and tell her how much I loved her and wanted this to work out. But she would not sit with me, so instead I followed her around, futilely declaring my good intentions while she either ignored me or growled. When I tried to make her sit still and listen, she swiped at me and drew blood. Meanwhile Honus was delightful, playing with me and cuddling by day, sleeping close to me at night. It became easy for me to just about ignore Suki except to let her in and feed her, then let her out where she stayed all night.

One night, during a thunderstorm, my conscience woke; like many animals, Suki was afraid of storms, so I put my boots on, got an umbrella, and went out to call her. I found her sheltering under my neighbor’s car. For several moments I crouched there, entreating her to come in. She stayed put, hissing at me. After that night, I tried keeping her in again; she reacted by attacking me, actually charging me and swiping with her front paws — and sometimes she connected. Her fury was several times bigger than her body, and I was becoming angry in response — very angry. The last time she struck out at me, I got down on the floor and said to her, “If you hurt me, I will kill you. I don’t want to do that. But if you really hurt me, I am going to kill you.” She could not have understood my words, but I am sure she understood my message. She flattened her ears against her head and, pupils dilated, hissed with teeth fully exposed as if to say, “If I could, I would kill you right now” and then went for the door. I opened it for her.

Around this time, I called the vet and asked him if he thought there was anything I could do to improve the situation. He told me that the only way was to remove the kitten — or Suki. He said Suki had probably developed the tooth infection right around the time Honus arrived and that the stress of my leaving had likely made it much worse; he thought she had associated the increasingly terrible pain and the disruption of her home with the kitten and that there was no way to reverse that.

I had to choose between an enraged middle-aged cat who hated me versus an adorable kitten who loved me or at least acted that way. The more I thought about it, the more natural it seemed to … end the misery. I couldn’t believe what I was thinking of doing: taking Suki to the ASPCA, where she would almost certainly die. I remember saying to someone, “If a person acted toward me the way that Suki has, I wouldn’t tolerate them in my home either.” Of course the person said, “Yes, but you wouldn’t have them killed.” And I wouldn’t, not only because I couldn’t (at least not legally) but because for most people (and for me) to essentially kill a member of our own species is a profoundly wrong act that not many of us are going to commit just because we don’t like certain behavior.

But an animal is in another category. Since infancy, we are brought up to see them as less valuable than we are even if we love them; in that way we are very like … other animals. Animals generally prefer their own species. How often does an animal feel morally compelled to show a weaker species consideration? No natural predator hesitates, when hungry, to kill another species for food or, in the case of cats, for pleasure. Part of the reason we feel superior is our very real capacity to choose to act differently. But our connection with animals reminds us of that more fundamental, less moral way of being. As predator or prey, animals are always closer to the reality of killing than we are, and on a very subliminal level, their proximity brings us closer too.

None of that made what I was contemplating any less cruel. What pulled me back from the brink of this awful choice was not an appeal to abstract ethics. It was an appeal to my own well-being — which I’d somehow forgotten was linked to Suki’s. I told a close friend that I had just about made up my mind to take my old cat to the ASPCA for being too mean. She was silent for a long moment. She said, “I hope you reconsider. You’re really mad at Suki right now, but you love her. If you take her there and she’s put down, I don’t think you’re going to be able to live with yourself.”

As soon as she said it, I knew she was right; it was as if her words awakened me from a trance of ruthlessness. At first, I was not happy about it. My decision was made easier when Barbara said she would love to adopt Honus. Miserably, I removed his food dishes; miserably, I vacuumed his fur off the rug. When dinnertime came, I let Suki in. The house probably still reeked of Honus, and she didn’t behave very differently at first. But slowly she realized the intruder was gone. On our first evening, she didn’t demand to go outside; she didn’t sleep with me or show me any affection, but she didn’t hiss or snarl either. I didn’t try to pet her; I watched and waited to see what she would do.

The next evening I found out. She had just eaten and had not asked to go outside. I was sitting on the couch watching TV. For the first time in maybe two months, she jumped onto the couch with me. I said, “Hi, Suki.” She groomed herself for a few minutes. And then she languorously stretched her body and came into my lap. To my delight, she responded to my petting with unreserved purring. Our bodies synced and relaxed; she soon fell deeply asleep as I blissfully watched the tube. At one point some unexpected noise woke her with a start; she looked up at me with an expression of great relief. She then put her head back down, sighed, and stretched her forepaw out on my leg, gripping my pants with her claws as if to say, “Mine. All mine.” It was true. Honus was a lovely kitten, but Suki was my cat and I was her person. Regardless of who had more power, our well-being was inextricably linked. In some impossible-to-define psychic sense, we were, at that moment, equal.

[data-uri="www.thecut.com/_components/clay-subheader/instances/clzmu011h001m0pj69jp4ge54@published"]{color:#d0021c;font-family:'Canela',Georgia,serif;font-size:14px;font-weight:700;letter-spacing:3px;text-transform:uppercase;line-height:18px} Is My Cat a Prisoner? And other ethical questions about pets like …

➭ Are We Forcing Our Pets to Live Too Long? ➭ Am I a Terrible Pet Parent? ➭ Why Did I Stop Loving My Cat When I Had a Baby? ➭ What Do Vets  Really  Think About Us and Our Pets? ➭ I Am Not My Animal’s Owner. So What Am I? ➭ Should I Give My Terrier ‘Experiences’? ➭ Is There Such a Thing As a Good Fishbowl? ➭ Do Runaway Dogs Deserve to Be Free? ➭ Are We Lying to Ourselves About Emotional-Support Animals? ➭ Does My Dog Hate Bushwick? ➭ How Agonizing Is It to Be a Pug?

• new york magazine

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