#girls after they type up an incomprehensible wall of text: yeah thats fine post it

[kylejsugarman]

its crazy how u can distill the two schools of thought regarding "pushing students to succeed" using two of jesse's offscreen, throwaway high school experiences. early in the show, we see that jesse still has a chemistry test with walt's "ridiculous—apply urself" comment written at the top. it's no secret at all that walt presently thinks very little of jesse's intelligence, that he views him as a Failure. and even if that wasn't necessarily the case back when jesse was actually walt's student, u get the feeling just from the way those three words are written that walt never attempted to understand jesse. the "ridiculous" insinuates that walt actually does see potential in jesse, that he feels that jesse could succeed, but the "apply urself" is where everything falls apart. it's a simple directive. there's no guidance, no attempt to understand why it is that jesse's NOT "applying himself" or how he operates. i mean, we see right off the bat in the show that walt does not Get jesse and makes very few attempts to adjust his opinion of him because it has already been set in stone (junkie, failure, lazy, irresponsible), and based on walt's other interactions with different characters, he doesn't take it very well when other people don't act according to His standards: he views it as an intentional display of insolence or some engrained shortcoming. walt doesn't instinctively see how people's personalities and pasts and self-perceptions and current dilemmas shape their behavior, and that probably translated to a premature dismissal of jesse as a lost cause when his directives, his commands didn't prompt any change in behavior. walt told jesse to do better, jesse didn't, and that's where walt stopped because clearly jesse is not Willing and has too many Static character flaws to do better.

and then u have the story about jesse's woodshop teacher. the one who saw jesse's first pass at the box project and said "u can do better than that". in some ways, it's not so different from the "apply urself" comment: the teacher is asking jesse to apply himself, to try harder. but it's not that simple directive that in two words assumes that jesse wasn't applying himself and is willfully failing. the teacher sees jesse's potential and he also sees jesse's personality. he knows that this kid won't say "yeah sure whatever" to a comment like that and continue to do the bare minimum. jesse needed to be told that he Could do better, not that he Should do better. he needed to be told that there wasn't just "potential" in him: there is concrete skill and talent. the teacher saw that jesse had been written off time and time again because of how he thought about and approached his work, how jesse had come to accept what he saw as the Truth (he isn't smart, he isn't good at things, he's a failure), and he challenged jesse to question this label. to not just passively accept it. jesse initially responds to this challenge out of spite, but as he tells the story, u see just how much pride and joy doing that project inspired. how he was able to make something Beautiful, how there Was something in him capable of success—how maybe people were wrong about him. obviously jesse needed more support than that to truly change his behavior and how he viewed himself, but there's a reason that jesse daydreams about putting that kind of care and effort into carving a box during the finale when he's at his lowest. he's retreating into one of his brightest memories—the memory of what it was like to love himself, even for just a moment.