June 30th, 2009
If I hear one more person complain about their bad grade in the same breath they confess to having utterly shitty study habits, I am going to kill someone. Fuck, this gets right under my skin.
This is what I learned in school: if you want A’s then you have to work for them. And not just once, but every time, so you improve your skills over time. Trying hard is not in and of itself a guarantee of an A – maybe right now your best work just isn’t that great.
You can almost certainly get better, but you’re going to have to work at it. Which leads me to…
I don’t understand people who slack at school. What the hell are you doing there if you’re just going to skip the reading and skip the classes and bang out shitty papers the day they’re due? Fuck man, go get a job and at least stop sliding into debt with nothing to show for it. So many people seem to just plain not get the point of school: to learn things. You’re not there to see how little you can get away with and not be flunked out. This isn’t an exercise in defiance. If you want to learn things, which is the point of school, you have to actually carry out the activities of learning. Not coincidentally, learning and improving your school skills result in better grades.
I have seen a lot of entitled attitude in people who are lazy students. Surprise – your natural intelligence isn’t good enough any more. University is an ocean of intelligent people and a C represents an average achievement. It’s time to let go of the idea that you deserve an A the first time you try hard.
This is the secret of people who get fantastic grades: they work hard. I’m in that club and I know others who are in it too. It looks like we’re super bright when we always have the answer and smash tests out of the park, but guess what? That all came at a price. We didn’t pull that answer out of our asses. We didn’t suddenly learn how to write a devastating paper the first time we put pen to paper. Sustained hard work needs to be paired with accurate self reflection and insight, and incorporating feedback; it takes practice to make your hard work work hard for you. And this is what great students do. We don’t throw up our hands and blame anyone but ourselves when we get bad feedback – we fucking learn from that shit and do better next time.
And, almost anyone can do it. You just have to drop the entitled attitude and dig in to the work. There is no magic bullet, no brilliant talent. Just hours and hours of work, every day. For every hour I spent in class, I probably put in between three and four hours of work outside of class. Maybe more. Reading, researching, writing, getting help, finding extra sources, all of that. Working and practicing. I graduated from my master’s with a perfect 4.0 GPA and on more than one course grade sheet I got the feedback that if my school had offered A+’s, I would have gotten one.
So when someone complains that the one time they made an effort, it didn’t pay off so therefore the vague criteria or the markers or fucking space aliens are to blame… well, I just want to destroy stuff.
Have I been complaining again?
You? Heck no.
“There is no magic bullet, no brilliant talent.”
Sometimes it’s all about brilliant talent.
I know two brothers, both with graduate level educations in the humanities. Let’s call them Mark and Mac.
Mark is just more naturally gifted. Mac works his balls off. They once took an upper division UG class in Philosophy together. They followed their respective patterns, Mac killed himself with hours of research, revisions, edits, and polish, until it was the best paper he could produce. Mark looked at some sources, and intuitively made some startling connections, and wrote a better paper. Mark and Mac both ended up with A’s, in the course, Mac in the high 90th percentile, Mark in the mid nineties, because he couldn’t be bothered to do show up to all the class discussions. Mac’s attendance of course, was perfect.
I think Mac resents his brother to this day because Mark always manages to accomplish the same results and grades almost effortlessly. He didn’t work hard, got his degree, and moved into a well paying job where he can still not do a lot, effort wise and be lauded for his results. He’s just ahead of the curve, intellect wise.
I was friends with Mark, and intellectually we were in the same boat. I would often be puzzled by how stressed my classmates were as exams and papers approached. I didn’t quite get it at first. We had all been in the same lectures, they took notes, I didn’t. Surely they picked up all the information they needed to know. I blew through the texts, I saw the connections, why were they reading the chapter again? Why couldn’t they write like me? Why did their writing styles seem so mechanical and forced?
They just weren’t naturals.
I agree that people shouldn’t bitch about bad grades when they don’t work hard. Honestly though, some people do very well without working too hard at all. It took me forever to get up on water skis, I took a friend of mine out to the lake the other day, and he was up on the first try. A natural. Also, dumb as a post.
For the vast majority I’m sure it’s all blood, sweat and tears, but not for all.
~I.
Congratulations on being brilliant. I hope no one patterns their schoolwork life after you. Just imagine what you could get done in your lifetime if you actually worked at it!
I guess it all depends on how you view the purpose of life. In certain professions, perhaps there is more of a duty to be the absolute best. Prima facie, one would want a surgeon to be the best he could be at surgery, not to kinda glance at the latest journal, and get to work. However even that is a bit off the mark, because what we really care about is that he’s good enough to make sure the operation is completely successful. Presuming the operation isn’t the hardest thing in the world to perform, the doctor probably doesn’t need every scrap of knowledge he ever learned to perform it successfully.
If your goal is “learn all I can,” then perhaps busting your colloquial balls is the way to go. However is there anything wrong with living a more balanced, less intensive life at the cost of a little knowledge, or a few grade points? The Academy is a joke in many ways, and if you have to jump through hoop X and Y at 80% to get the paper, that gets you the job you like, and money you need, why not smell the roses at 82% rather than run by them because you feel you should make the 95% hoop?
Where’s the absolute merit in doing ones best?
~I.
I guess it’s a matter of opinion. If you don’t want to try hard or do your best or achieve more than you initially thought you could – fill yer boots! The world needs loafers too. Lots of people don’t think it’s worth it to put in 15 units of effort for a A when 7 units will score you a B+. I have no quarrel with that (just don’t bitch about your grade!) – it’s your life, do what you want with it. For me, learning is intrinsically rewarding. I like doing it and it’s not really work for me in the usual sense of the word.
And I don’t skip the roses. Surely that is obvious? I spend a lot of time doing things I enjoy and I’m happy with my life. Working hard in no way precludes having a balanced life. That’s just a myth perpetuated by the people who think it’s a good use of their time to watch 4 hours of TV every day (that’s the US average). ;P
University can be quite overwhelming for a lot of people. One day, you’re one of the smartest kids in the class, who almost never has to study, but do at least a token amount because your parents make you. The next, you’re just average, and you do have to study, but you never learned the self-discipline to make yourself do it. And you just don’t get why your old behaviors aren’t yielding the same results.
At the same time, you’re on your own for the first time, and making lots of new friends that you want to spend time with. Add to that the realization that you can drink beer and/or have sex at any time without having to justify or explain yourself to anyone is not a conducive environment for developing self-discipline.
As for both working hard and having a balanced life – that can heavily depend on what degree you’re working towards. In engineering, to get every assignment done and attend every class would probably have been about 60 hours per week, bumping up to 90 during mid-terms, finals, and when big projects were due.
So true. School is definitely a skill you have to learn. And until you do, it can crush you! I definitely suffered from the lack of self discipline problem my first go around. And I don’t think most study skills programs are worth a bean either. It’s mainly an issue of maturity I suspect, and I don’t know how to teach that.
And yeah… engineering is insane, I have no idea why they make the courseload so heavy. I believe it is the heaviest of all the undergrad programs? Most programs won’t allow you to take more than 16 credit hours per term! Engineers should be so lucky.
When workload is totally outside your control I guess it’s only reasonable to acknowledge that there is only so much a person can do to keep up and/or excel. But I don’t think that is normally the case. IMO most people don’t really work that hard at school. It’s not that they don’t have enough time, it’s that they’d rather spend their time watching TV or getting drunk and didn’t have the foresight to take a lighter courseload.
And I totally don’t think everyone has to go to school or that getting A’s is the be all end all! *If* you want to do well I think my prescription is by and large going to be a reliable one. If you don’t care, then cool, do what you want. (But don’t bitch about your marks.) Academics is not the most important thing in life either – we would be greatly impoverished without the fine arts and skilled trades as just two examples. I guess I mainly think the best way to live your life is to give your all to the things that matter to you, to the extent that you are able, and to be nice to other living things.