Elif Koc - The Atlantic: A year and a half ago, I was fully immersed in the routine of being a high-school junior. On an average night, my Internet tabs looked something like this: page 2 of a desperate Google search on “Differential equations easy examples,” a vocabulary list on Quizlet.com, a couple Wikipedia articles, my school newspaper, email, Twitter, a YouTube video, and a Yahoo! Answers session called “What is the easiest SAT subject test if you are bad at math?”
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I feel that I had a similar high school experience as described in this article, but for different reasons. The person writing here talks about being overloaded with work because of taking too many classes, but I think it is also interesting to explore what can occur when activities outside of the classroom take up most of a high schooler's free time. For most of us who read this article, myself included, that activity was theatre. In the group I was part of in particular, there was also a distinct pressure to have not only good, but some of the best grades in the school. So, not only were we putting on shows, we were overextended ourselves as far as classwork was concerned as well. Minimization was most definitely a theme of my high school career. What shortcuts can I take, how many, and how often, in order to still get an A? For most of us, this worked. I'm still not sure if we were just playing the game well or if this is a major flaw in the education system today.
I, too, had a similar experience to the author of this article in high school. I do not remember a single class in high school that I placed my desire to learn above my desire to get good grades. In college, I knew that the grades would matter less than they did in high school, since the skills I would be learning would eventually translate into the skills I will be using in my career and life outside of school. Sometimes, I still struggle with accepting the idea that "grades do not matter" in high school. Our generation has been brought up in the education system to be obsessed with grades. We have been taught by our parents and educators to measure our success through the grade we receive on a test or in a class. In college, while grades can be a good way to gauge how you are doing in a class, college students should not be completing their work with only the grade in their mind. With that said, I truly believe that, in college, you get out of it what you put into it. It is completely possible to get through college with the same minimalist attitude described in the article. However, when college work is completed for the sake of learning and learning only, a college student will come out much more knowledgeable and capable to succeed in the real world.
I agree with Jess on the idea that our generation has been raised to perform to receive a reward as opposed to performing for your own personal good. I high school, I too was obsessed with grades, mostly because I believed they would dictate where I would go next in life. I also knew that the skills rather than the grades would be what mattered in college, though I still have a very hard time accepting this. I think I have to agree with the author. I loved being a student and I thrived on stress alot of the time. But I must admit that there were several classes where I was present to get my A and get out, as I knew I would not be using a majority of the material I was learning. In doing this, however, I taught myself how to prioritize and truly invest in classes I thought mattered while still fulfilling requirements (and rather well too) for my other classes. While I didn't absorb all the information given to me, was able to get the most important things and became a very capable multi-tasker and time manager, because I had to divide my attention between so many subjects. I honestly believe I am a better student and learner today because I better know how prioritize things and I am more sensitive to the degrees of effort that come with fulfilling requirements.
I think the kid in this article needs some big lessons in time management. I went to a public high school where a vast majority of my peers went on to ivy league schools. It wasn't as intense as a private school, but the competition from my fellow peers was unfathomable. We all were taking honors and AP classes, 8 classes a day, for four years of high school, and making straight A's. A lesson I learned in high school was how to take my education into my own hands. If the teacher wasn't teaching me what I wanted to know, I would learn it on my own. If the test was too hard and covered material that wasn't given in class, I would go in for help during lunch or for extra after school tutoring. This isn't to say that I tried that hard in all of my classes. I did enough to get the A, and did no more than that, but I also learned what I wanted to learn. I got out of my education what I put into it. The same can be said for college. What a lot of students in our generation don't get is that it's not someone else's responsibility to make sure we're learning. It's up to us to make sure we're learning everything we need in order to survive in this world.
This definitely felt like me in high school. I attempted to do the least amount of work that would achieve me the highest grade. I poured over rubrics, making sure that I wouldn't get points off for mindless things. It's not that I was "scraping by," but with everything else on my plate, focusing on one singular subject was not an option. Doing well across the board was the main goal in high school, and it didn't matter if you understood the material but that you could spit it back out and "play the system." This is especially the case in many foreign language classes. If you figured out the way the worksheet was set up, you could figure out verb tenses with ease and without much thinking. I thought, naively, that this was how you learned. I was caught off guard my senior year, in my AP Spanish class, as I was expected to speak the language in such a way that I had never done before. For once, I wasn't filling in pointless worksheets and had to analyze the language. I learned more in that one year of Spanish than I ever did in years previous. That being said, more classes should be taught in a way that focuses more on the learning rather than the grade.
I went through a similar experience in high school and completely agree with everything in the article. I was more interested in discussing the last sentence. "I hope college is where I can become a good learner." I think at this point I have come to the realization that it is a mixture. The amount of work we are being given prevents us from doing everything to the best of our ability, but there is no point in attending college if you are not learning. I have come to a medium where I am suing those same shortcuts to try and be a good student, but in the process I am trying to take in as much as I can. This means a lot of things get filtered out. There are is a lot of information and if I could retain it all I would, but it comes down to deciding which is most relevant to me. I am more likely to be able to repeat information from Basic PTM last year than information about figure drawing learned in Studiocraft, and I would hope the designers are the opposite. So in some classes I am only a good student but in as many as I can be I am a good learner.
The author is talking about two different ways of thinking about learning. Are you going to school to get a good education or are you going to school to teach yourself how to work in the real world. Getting a good education means you take the time to learn things and you care less about grades. If you are going to school to teach yourself how to be a person in the real world than I think that being a "good student" is important. Having too much to do and learning how to do as little work as possible to create the best result is sort of what real life work is about.
I don't know which approach to life/school is better but I would argue with the author and say that the two can be combined. I think you learn how to juggle a busy work load and get everything done while taking time and really learning the things that you want to and will be the most important in your life.
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