Is your Student Flying Under the Radar?

A life skill your high school and college students need to learn

Taking Up Space: A Lesson I Taught My B Students

When I taught Freshman Seminar at a university, I gave a lecture that stayed with at least one student for years — she wrote to me eight years later to say so.

The lecture was about something simple: showing up.

---

The Gradebook Glitch

Midway through the semester, I released grades and noticed something strange. The gradebook was miscalculating. After digging into it, I realized this wasn’t just my class — it was a system-wide error in the new grading software.

I was the first person to catch it.

Why?

Because in my class, everyone started with an A. They could only lose their A — they didn’t have to earn it. That reverse process made it easy for me to spot a trend of sliding grades.

---

The Psychology of the B Student

Now, I’m not a psychologist, nor did I train in psychology, but this grading experiment revealed something deeper.

I could instantly tell who the A students were.
I could spot the C-on-their-way-to-an-F students.
But it was the B students — the quiet majority — who concerned me most.

Unless I made a concentrated effort to get to know them, they would just exist, quietly moving through class and potentially through life completely under the radar.

---

So I Did Something Extreme

I gave the A students the day off.
I gave the struggling students the day off.
And I held class with the B students.

We did a full class session — lecture, questions, group work, presentations. The class was extremely quiet. There were no interruptions. We finished early.

That was the plan.

And that’s when I launched into my real lecture — the one about showing up.

---

B Students: The Quiet Clock-In, Clock-Out Majority

These students never raised their hands.
They didn’t talk.
They hadn’t made friends with each other.
They treated class like a future job — punch in, punch out.

They were kind, polite, and they accepted whatever anyone said or offered at face value.

These are model students in many eyes, but I worried about them the most so because it was Freshman Seminar, and because I was supposed to teach life and college skills, I changed their curriculum for the next five weeks.

---

The New Assignment: TAKE UP SPACE

The rest of the class continued their regular coursework. But for these students, I created a completely different set of assignments — focused entirely on one goal:

Learn to take up space.

If you have a teen heading back to school this fall, here’s what I had my B students do.

This isn’t to say every B student flies under the radar — but I worked with many first-gen college students, and this was my experience.

These ideas can apply to all students.

A Few Life Assignments:

CAUTION: Yes, these are anxiety-inducing for many, but my students' grades depended on them.

Maybe your teen won’t get through all 14 of these on Day 1… or even Month 1.
That’s okay. These are life skills, not checkboxes. And they will set your kid apart more than SATs or GPAs ever will.