How much American bootstrap ideology are we obligated to deliver to students? This week Ryan Boyd and I take a look at some “practical advice” about “surviving college” from a couple of recent popular books on the subject, and we discover a disturbing strain of self-help/New Age/Protestant work ethic/grindset philosophy that, perhaps unsurprisingly, fails to acknowledge structural and material barriers (money, food, housing, etc) to student success. So what’s a teacher to do? Sell the hustle or sell the trapdoor?

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