Now, imagine that it's late on Monday night. Your kids have been put to bed, but your spouse is insisting on some alone time, and you've already spent nine hours today reading through these applications. The one in your hand looks pretty much like all those thousands of others. If only there were some way to decide without having to wade through the 500-word essay about the summer spent digging latrines in Kenya...

And there it is -- an easy way out, right there in the third sentence: "The days are hot and dry, your thirsty, tired, and homesick." Not "you're," but "your." The essay may go on to articulate inspired truths about human nature. It may reveal some novel insight that has never been revealed before. But here's the rub: This admissions officer with the limited time and frustrated spouse is done. Three lines into the essay, the application lands squarely on the "No" pile.

This example tends to upset my students. They wail, "But that's unfair! Shouldn't it be the ideas that count? That's about appearances, not content!" And they are right. Ideas should be judged on substance rather than appearances, but this simply is not how our world works. We live in a society where appearances matter, where in order to be heard and taken seriously we are judged quickly and superficially.

I wrote a piece recently for this magazine about the reasons I enforce dress codes among my middle school students. I got a lot of flak because some readers believed I was "slut-shaming," judging my female students by their hemlines rather than their brains or character, but I disagree. Do I wish that I could send my students out into the world wearing whatever they want and still see them judged on the content of their intellect and character?



Sure. I absolutely agree that we should not be judging girls on the length of their skirts any more than we judge them on their ability to discern "affect" from "effect," but we do. In order to get through the door at an interview or past the threshold of an application process, my students are going to have to meet a standard, and it's part of my job to teach them about that standard.

That said, I teach my students to dream about a world in which they can be respected for the content of their thoughts rather than for the style of their clothes or the placement of their commas. In fact, I hope they grow up to be the people who can help the world embrace this vision of substance over style. The reality is that in order to create change for tomorrow, my students must be heard, and part of my job is to teach them how to be heard in the world as it exists today. If I taught my students that they could go to a job interview wearing a bikini and wielding a wadded resume riddled with errors and still be respected for their brains and skills, I would not be doing them any favors.