So what if you're not always perfrect?

This semester I have asked my rhetoric students to write weekly for ten minutes on a famous quotation. The goal is that it will build fluency and comfort. There's a rough format for their responses: paraphrase, show how it's true (using examples from your life and the real world), then show how it might have some unexpected consequences if we really took it to heart. Sometimes students see that the veneer on common, uplifting, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps quotations is pretty thin, and leaves those who try and fail in a funk. This article in the New York Times talks about the unintended negative consequences of believing in the ubiquitious maxims of perfectionism in the American culture:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/04/health/04mind.html?em&ex=1197608400&en=12509c9b97c24d7f&ei=5070