Column: Criticism isn’t a character judgment — taking it well is a skill to learn

Some of my most vivid childhood memories — aside from years of laughter with my loving parents — involve crying at the dinner table doing math homework with my dad. I’ve heard enough similar stories from my friends to prove that this is a common childhood experience.

After the challenging homework was finished, I’d get a hug from my parents and usually forget about the incident. Having a personal connection with someone makes emotionally tense situations easier to overcome, as you remember they like you afterwards. 

Correlating intelligence to self-worth is an affliction faced by most people, and perhaps even more by college students. However, we don’t need to resign to this feeling of worth determined by external validation. With enough exposure to criticism, being capable of accepting feedback without breaking into tears is a skill that can be developed over time.

The list of skills which we’re asked to develop over the course of our college years typically include time management, fiscal responsibility and how to do laundry. 

While I’ve thus far managed to wash my sheets, not spend all my money and usually get to class on time, I’ve noticed myself lacking an armor to fend off the commentary from my professors. Feedback, no matter how thorough, becomes much harder to accept when there’s not always a face to the name of the person who you’re hearing it from.

Unlike my lovely parents, there’s no hug from your professor or TA after you get the feedback “this doesn’t make any sense” on an essay (let’s pretend this isn’t from personal experience). Feedback in written form from someone you have a limited relationship with always makes comments feel harsher than they really are. 

Before I complain further without developing my own desensitization to criticism, let me share two solutions that have worked well for me.

First, get people to read your writing aloud to you. This could look like going to a professor’s office hours and talking through a draft with them. You could even go as far as I did by applying to be an Opinion columnist to have editors criticize my writing. 

It’s vulnerable to hear your writing criticized in front of you. But it allows you to remember that they’re criticizing your ideas, not you as a person or the effort you’ve given. Separating these has allowed me to take more intellectual risks in front of people I respect.

Second, be critical of the criticism. I know this sounds convoluted and relatively meta, but please bear with me. Biased grading and bad days affect how valid a piece of criticism is. This means that we have no obligation to accept each piece of feedback we receive, only those which are valid and meaningfully contribute to the quality of our work. 

Acknowledging the subjectivity in criticism gives us a hand in our own progress, instead of assuming every comment is always factual. Rather than focusing on suppressing our emotional reactions, we learn to pick and choose what feedback to accept. When we become better at managing our feelings and accepting feedback, and thus become more comfortable reaching out to others for it, our skills become stronger than they would be if we operated in isolation. 

Now that I’m a little older, I’ve realized it wasn’t anything particularly negative about my parents’ behavior that was making me cry. What made me emotional was a fear that two people who I respected so much, both for their intelligence and character, might think of me as less than because I couldn’t solve a problem correctly.

I still get on the phone with my dad to talk through my writing sometimes, but I understand that none of his feedback is an attack on me, just on a half-formed idea that needs some help anyways. 

@dthopinion | opinion@dailytarheel.com