Same here. Once I figured out that I didn't really have to do any homework in high school, and wasn't even required to do so in university, I was doomed.
I'm now trying to teach my son that just learning to do the work, even if it's boring, is the real skill you need. But he's too focused on winning every mini-game.
This. I found out if I showed up everyday in high school and focused in class I could get a B or A in every class without doing any work at home. I still did some homework but it was in school. My time outside of school was mine. It was great.
I had a very rude wake up call when I got to college.
I know high schoolers now and I encourage them to actually do the work. It's not that x,y,z topic may be important someday... It's the skill of doing the work, even when you don't want to, that will be important in life.
Though nobody is good at working hard to reap rewards that are a decade or more down the line, which is where learning to do boring work really pays off.
Wasn't that debunked? It's useful as a myth - "teach your kids patience", "don't go into the woods alone" - but it doesn't actually turn out to be true.
I've not been able to find anything about it being debunked. Wikipedia[0] says
> A 2012 study at the University of Rochester (with a smaller N= 28) altered the experiment by dividing children into two groups: one group was given a broken promise before the marshmallow test was conducted (the unreliable tester group), and the second group had a fulfilled promise before their marshmallow test (the reliable tester group). The reliable tester group waited up to four times longer (12 min) than the unreliable tester group for the second marshmallow to appear.[11][12] The authors argue that this calls into question the original interpretation of self-control as the critical factor in children's performance, since self-control should predict ability to wait, not strategic waiting when it makes sense.
but it sounds like the original experiment controlled for the trust factor so I don't really think it shows that the original results were invalid.
Having said that, I've not done a huge amount of research into this so maybe take my opinions with a grain of salt or two.
It wasn’t exactly debunked, but seems to measure something different to what they thought recently. So as a parent your takeaway should be to give your kid experiences of delayed gratification that actually pays off, and help them learn to identify which scenarios fit into this.
Maybe try to figure out how to make the work fun? Or, try and instill a goal less of "getting the grade" and more "attain mastery of the subject"?
I would have been burnt in college, except I got to homeschool the last few years of high school. During that time I took CLEP tests. They were pretty easy for the most part, but they required I actually do the reading and prepare for them. That helped, since in school I just had to pay attention in class, and I'd be good. Then I went to a community college for most of my core classes. That helped too, because there the homeworks either were optional or counted for very little, but I got to see how not doing them hurt my grade. By the time I went to the actual university I wanted to for my major specific stuff, I had developed better study habits, and knew what it took to actually do well. I was helped at that point that, since it was the courses relevant to my major, it was all stuff I was interested in, and actually wanted to attain mastery in.
> Maybe try to figure out how to make the work fun?
I don't think this is the right approach, because you need the ability to focus on work even when it is not fun.
You do need something that makes the work rewarding in some way, but I wouldn't push to hard to try to make it fun.
> Or, try and instill a goal less of "getting the grade" and more "attain mastery of the subject"?
This was my approach in high school as well. It led to me being the one everyone wanted to study with because I picked up the material the best, but then I flunked classes because I never did the homework.
I would flunk classes that depended mostly on homework, and ace classes that depended mostly on tests. Since I had convinced myself that mastery was more important than grades, this reinforced my behavior.
Somehow, the acing the tests part allowed me to get into an Ivy League college. Which I then flunked out of because at that point, I couldn't get by without actually doing the homework and studying outside of class.
This pattern of behavior continues to be something I struggle with as an adult. I can be quite productive for short bursts of time, but have a hard time keeping on track with longer term projects that don't pay off immediately.
I think what you need is to learn the value of steady incremental work that only shows significant results after a long period of time. Basic reinforcement training techniques can be used for this; provide rewards for getting incremental work done, but better to provide them intermittently. Eventually work up from smaller rewards for smaller goals to larger rewards for larger goals.
I think that reinforcing consistency, habit, and small incremental progress rather than brilliance is a big part of what you need. The problem with brilliance is that you can easily get a lot of positive reinforcement for it; people are impressed at how well you understand something, at how much you know, at how quickly you pick it up. But even if you are better than average at picking things up and figuring things out, you will eventually hit the limits of what you can do through brilliance alone; there are some things that will just take long hard work no matter what, and then all of that reinforcement for brilliance comes back to bite you because you're not getting the same kind of reinforcement, and you can easily get stuck and lose faith in your self-image.
>> Maybe try to figure out how to make the work fun?
> I don't think this is the right approach, because you need the ability to focus on work even when it is not fun.
this is just coming from my personal experience, but i think it is very important for a kid to have a job sometime in the high school years. my parents are fairly well off and they "protected" me from this need by just giving me spending money (sometimes for a trivial amount of chores, but usually just free money), so that a menial job would not distract me from my studies. of course, i just spent that money on frivolous things and outings with friends that distracted me from school anyway, and i ended up doing quite poorly (though i made it most of the way through a fairly prestigious school before it caught up with me).
eventually i transferred to a regional (but still quite rigorous) university and had to get a restaurant job to pay my expenses. i learned a whole lot about the world real fast. it wasn't so much that i learned about the value of steady work, but rather that low wage jobs in low margin industries really slam home the point that you will never have anything unless you put in the work, and i worked real hard from that point on. i still have bouts of procrastination, but i never just let things slide now, and every time i spend a dollar i feel the amount of my own labor that i am letting go.
One way to control unnecessary spending is to put the price in terms of how many hours you had to work to get that money. Then it becomes easy to put the item back on the shelf.
i agree, and i often think things out explicitly that way. i actually take a step further though. some fraction of my expenses are fixed (rent, insurance, food to an extent) which leaves me with some percentage of disposable income, call it 25% for this example. so if i get paid $20/hr, a $20 item that isn't absolutely necessary doesn't cost me one hour of work, but rather four, because three quarters of that money is "already spent". suddenly it doesn't seem like i need the shiny new gadget that badly.
Making work fun is nice, but what really improved my effectiveness was cultivating the ability to do work that wasn't fun, but valuable. I think it depends on your strategy. I will always be able to accomplish what I need to now, but since I'm not passionate, I probably will never be brilliant.
We're talking about university here - if you need to rely on feeling passionate about every single course you take, and you actually do, then you're one in a million.
My dad told me that school isn't about learning, it's about learning how to learn. That really changed my perspective. I won't care about classical painters and what years they were around and why they were remarkable in even 6 months, but when I do find something I care about, I'll be able to apply focus and learn.
GPA has no impact on your final degree in the US either. You complete the same coursework and get the same degree as the person with a perfect GPA.
The only real exception is if you’re screwing up so bad that they kick you out, in which case you don’t get the degree because you don’t complete the coursework.
What I meant is that in the UK the "class" of degree us (or at least used to be) based almost entirely on what you did in your final year. People seem to refer to GPA for US degrees in the same way that we use the class of honours: first, upper second etc. even though they would appear to measure different things.
On a number of occasions I have had prospective employers ask what my final grade was for specific classes. I have never been asked about my GPA specifically, but my grades at the University certainly affected me beyond academia.
Before I graduated, when I was interviewing for jobs, lots of companies wouldn't interview anyone with lower than a certain GPA. Google was the most notable one, although they've since gotten rid of that requirement since they found it has almost no correlation with your performance as an employee.
Other larger companies that cared were Lutron, Epic, and a few more I don't really remember. I think Epic even asked me what my ACT score was.
Beyond that first job though, my GPA hasn't mattered at all, which is good because mine was pretty mediocre.
Outside of the college recruitment pipeline, I've neither seen nor heard of anyone asking for gpa. Some places want or even require degrees, but nobody cares about gpa at all once you have a year of experience.
I have absolutely no idea. If it helps, that company also wouldn't hire one of my best interns without him taking some programming language courses. He had a 4-year degree, too. They also didn't want to hire one of my other good interns into an embedded role despite that being what she went to school for, and despite her having the aptitude for it. They wanted to hire her into SDET instead. I don't believe she took the job.
Actually university is fairly easy if you seize the learning opportunities that courses give you; many students attend neither lectures nor tutorials/exercises nor tutoriae and then complain how difficult it is to pass the exam.
This still happens even though older semesters will tell any freshmen that they need to attend courses and do exercises to make it. What kinda works are mandatory exercises.
"university is fairly easy if you seize the learning opportunities that courses give you"
It might be "fairly easy" if you're lucky enough to have had a decent K-12 education, which is what prepares you to do what you say and do it effectively.
Far too many students graduate high school barely literate, without knowing how to learn, without sufficient direction or motivation. That's not to mention various emotional and psychological issues students might struggle with that keep them from applying themselves and making the most of their university education. It's also not to mention the fact that way too many students look at university as primarily a place to party, or to cheat their way to a degree.
Hm, maybe. I attended all of my courses because that got me straight-As in high school. I was then blindsided by needing to study for anything ever. So I was engaged, as far as I knew - but I didn't know how unengaged I was.
This is why I think people need to work and grow up a bit between high school and university. Figure out why you want to go before you commit to it.
I was in the military for 4 years between them (and I was not a good student before), but I decided to go to university specifically to learn something that interested me. And it was sad seeing my peers waste their time doing the same stupid crap I'd outgrown and become bored of in the military. (At least there I wasn't expected to learn anything hard.)
I never learned to study in HS either, and then on top of the actual workload in college I suffered a brain injury shortly after HS graduation that ruined my short term memory function. That first year of college was a massive challenge in learning discipline and just learning!
