HIGH FLYERS
Becoming dux is the peak of school life, but what makes the high achievers take off and where do they go from there? By Julie Jacobson.
WHILE other 17-year-olds were out partying, Teresa Bergman was head down, studying. History, classics, German, English, geography. If an assignment was due, or there were exams, it was the same every day after school.
Bergman was 2004 dux at Lower Hutt’s Sacred Heart College. Now 21, Bergman, who graduated from Victoria University with a bachelor of arts in anthropology and German language last year, was so studious, she would even swot up on schoolwork during water polo training sessions.
‘‘I spent hours studying. I played water polo to a high level and sometimes we would have two training sessions a night. I’d stay at school before training and study and then study at the pool between sessions.’’
Many duxes often top not only their class year, but also outstrip older peers. But what makes a student a star? And where does that star end up? A recent American study found students with the best grades weren’t necessarily ‘‘smart’’, but worked hard and were less impulsive than others.
Marc Wilson, senior lecturer in psychology at Victoria University, says it is generally accepted that duxhood offers more than a hint of the adult to come, and that though ‘‘intelli- gence’’ is a one predictor of later success, certain personality traits, in particular diligence, also have a part to play.
‘‘There’s increasing agreement that there are five major components of personality that transcend all others, [extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, intellect/imagination] and of those, conscientiousness, or diligence, is one of the best predictors of success,’’ Dr Wilson says.
Duxes are most likely to be ‘‘maximisers’’— an economic term used to describe people for whom the goal is to be best.
‘‘They want to get things right, they spend a lot of time thinking about things, checking out and weighing up all the different options.’’
The rest of us are ‘‘satisficers’’ — satisfied with good enough. ‘‘Satisficers don’t stress out about how well they do in a test, maximisers do. They will autopsy it, worry about it and pick holes in their performance,’’ he says. ‘‘It becomes circular. The better you do, the more expectation there is.’’
Adolescent psychologist Michael CarrGregg says that though most duxes do tend to be ‘‘well rounded’’ — also good at sport, music or other extra-curricular activities such as drama or debating — high academic achievement tends to also attract people with obsessive personalities. Glenn Burgess, Wellington College dux in 1978, admits to ‘‘being always bookish and intellectual . . . not so much nerdy but a bit antisocial’’, preferring his own company to that of others.
He attributes his academic success to a fear of being bored, and a ‘‘quietly’’ competitive streak.
Burgess, 47, and head of history at Hull University, did his master’s degree at Victoria University before winning a scholarship to Cambridge where he did his PhD, before teaching at Canterbury University for six years.
He says history was never his forte — unlike maths, which he had an innate talent for, history was hard work ‘‘and still is’’.
Though being named dux was a source of pride — it ‘‘certainly wasn’t cool’’ — it isn’t included on his CV.
‘‘I was proud at the time. But it was all rather embarrassing. I was advised by one of the teachers not to appear too conceited or arrogant. ’’
He is married — his wife is also a historian — and has a teenage son.
‘‘I think I am better rounded now than when I was younger. I definitely have high standards — I don’t suffer fools gladly — and, it sounds pompous to say it, but I enjoy living a ‘life of the mind’.’’
FOR Teresa spect and came via national vision. Six months leaving school she singing her heart out as a finalist in series two of New Zealand Idol.
At school, the self-admitted workaholic, who is now working two jobs — during the day she’s a project officer for the non-profit organisation Human Rights for Education, at night she is vocalist for covers band Jonny and the Dreamboats — was consistently best in class. And that led to feelings of not wanting to let herself down, ‘‘an expectation of having to live up to something’’.
‘‘Everything I did came from me, it was self-motivation. I’m very much a driven person, an all or nothing type. It’s a bit of a double-edged sword I guess — it can be wonderful, but it can also mean everything becomes too much.’’
Bergman’s birth mother, who taught history and geography, died when she was four. Her father is a history teacher, at Lower Hutt’s Chilton Saint James, and her new mum is a maths teacher. ‘‘I’ve been told I am quite like my mother — she was quite a perfectionist apparently, and studious. I’ve always studied really hard. I’ve never left anything to chance . . . never left it to see what I could do naturally.’’ Bergman, rerecognition teleafter was
IT WAS the same for top lawyer Mai Chen, head girl, best all-round student and dux of Otago Girls’ High School in 1981. Her family moved to New Zealand, initially to Christchurch and then Dunedin, from Taiwan in 1970 when she was six.
She could speak two words of English: elephant and watermelon. She read — ‘‘an eclectic mix of books donated by ladies in the church and books my parents had brought over from the American school in Taiwan’’ — and watched television. She also captained several school sports teams, did gymnastics and was on the debating team.
‘‘Every minute of my day was taken up with something. I would wake up in the morning and go to sports practice. Then it was school and after that sports practice again. Then I’d race home, walk the dog, have dinner and do my homework.’’
She still runs — sprints around a small park in Wellington’s Botanic Gardens — and often wakes before dawn with a head full of thoughts.
Chen, who as a child would run out in front of cars in an attempt to race them, says it is only recently that she has allowed herself to feel she might be different from other people. ‘‘The expectations in our household were rather high. I always thought I was ordinary, just a normal average person. It’s taken me a long time to realise that I’m not, that I ‘run’ really fast and other people find it hard to keep up.’’
A foundation partner with former prime minister Geoffrey Palmer of Chen Palmer law firm, and mum to a five-year-old, Chen completed her master’s at Harvard, winning an award for best thesis and a scholarship to Geneva before returning to New Zealand.
‘‘If I had been brought up in a family where I could have had a pony, which is what I always wanted, it would have been different, but it wasn’t a family like that. It’s only now, in hindsight, I think that what I had was an advantage. At the time I was bitter about it. Why do I have to work so hard? Now I realise that part of the strength of people like me who become duxes is their ability to single-handedly drive themselves to achieve.’’
ANOTHER former Otago Girls’ dux, Alison Lipski (1973), also continued her studies after leaving school — BA Hons in Latin at Otago followed by a two-year fellowship at the University of British Columbia, work in a university library, law papers at Yale — but then she chose to homeschool her three sons.
She isn’t convinced her background had anything to do with her decision to keep her kids at home — ‘‘There were a number of reasons why I did it, and philosophically I liked the idea that kids could learn at their own pace according to their own interests’’ — but admits she struggles with the dux system’s emphasis on academic achievement.
She says that, often, people who are less academically inclined at school often tend to become more motivated in later life.
Lipski, whose oldest son is 23 and has just completed his BMus Hons, is now a contract editor and proofreader, something she says suits her ‘‘perfectionist and pedantic’’ personality.
TARANAKI assemblage artist and tae kwan do exponent Dale Copeland, 64, describes herself in similarly pejorative terms. ‘‘Obsessive? Yes there’s a bit of that. But, really, I’m a bundle of contradictions. The house is grossly untidy because I collect junk, but on the other hand when I am on the computer — I write websites for people — I am insanely methodical.’’
Dale was dux of New Plymouth Girls’ High School in 1961. Her parents divorced when she was five and she and an older brother were brought up by their mother. ‘‘It wasn’t till I was about 15 that I decided maybe I should buckle down and study,’’ she says. ‘‘I was totally naive and ignorant. I didn’t even know a place like university existed till then. I was so excited — to think there was a school you could go to after school. I thought everybody had to go and work in a factory.’’
She remembers her parents warning her she would be ‘‘left on the shelf’’ unless she stopped reading and started going out with boys, and being dumped by her first boyfriend after he discovered she got 98 per cent for School Certificate maths. ‘‘He didn’t like the fact that my lowest mark was higher than his top mark.’’
On leaving school, Copeland completed a BSc in maths and science, then spent a year travelling in the Australian outback before heading to London where she picked up work researching the potential of carbon fibre. ‘‘I was going to be a nuclear physicist. My first job when I graduated was calculating the holes that would be drilled into people’s skulls to insert little radioactive capsules . . . but I looked at the real people out in the waiting room and I couldn’t do it.’’
She returned home and took up teaching, first at Epsom Girls’, then at her old school in New Plymouth, during which time she and her husband Paul Hutchinson, also an artist, lived in a house bus at the local motorcamp. At the age of 43, she took early retirement and became a fulltime artist. She also homeschooled daughter Toby through to Year 11. ‘‘The three of us just stayed home and played . . . It was a sweet life.’’
LOWER HUTT’s Jerome Chandrahasen, St Bernard’s College dux in 2000, is one of several top scholars who have gone on to become comedians — others include Raybon Kan (former Wellington College dux) and Jon Bridges (Freyberg High School, Palmerston North). But Chandrahasen was more nerd than class clown during his college years. Becoming dux definitely gave him gravitas, he says, ‘‘but it was never a big deal’’.
Chandrahasen went on to do a double degree, a BA in politics and a BSc majoring in maths and linguistics, at Victoria University, where he got his first taste for stand-up comedy. ‘‘Toward the end I just wanted to stop bothering about the academic stuff. I got sick of maths classes where I couldn’t understand anything. I passed everything, but my heart just wasn’t in it.’’
A year later he was doing his OE, backpacking through Europe. The experience became the Backpackers Guide, for which he was voted best newcomer at the 2005 NZ International Comedy Festival Awards. He chucked in a job as a librarian for a law firm, and another as a filing clerk at Parliament, and became a fulltime comic.
He says he felt no parental pressure — his dad is a Fijian-Indian, his mother from Greymouth — to prove himself. ‘‘My parents were always very supportive of whatever I chose to do, and I think that’s really important— for people to do what they want to do, to do something they love doing and to hell with the rest.’’
That said, his academic achievement is recorded on his CV: ‘‘Dux ... yeah, three letters, they look quite good.’’