kids, when you’re choosing your college schedule, you’ll hear a voice saying “just take the 8AM class. it won’t be that bad. you’ve done it for this long” that’s the devil talking
Heed this wisdom.
I keep on seeing this post. As a college grad and a “morning person” here’s my two cents.
Don’t take 8ams! Don’t even take 9ams if you can help it. Always start your class going day at 10am or later. You can get up at 8am to eat breakfast and study/work on classwork if you like BUT DON’T SCHEDULE “I HAVE TO BE SOMEWHERE AND FUNCTIONAL” EARLY.
If you are going to be full-time, also don’t schedule night classes. Classes that start after 6pm are not fun either and leaving class to pitch black darkness will mess with you in a very different way.
As soon as you can, don’t take classes on Fridays. It boosts your morale to only have required classes 4 days a week, trust me. If Monday is easier to do this with then that works too.
If you work during the school year, don’t schedule more than a 4 hour shift on the same day you have class unless you want to be dead inside.
Random final note: Don’t forget to eat, shower, hydrate, sleep, and socialize. If you cannot breathe between class, work, and homework/studying you are over doing your schedule. You are going to make it through this. I believe in you.
alright don’t be mad but. i never read the great gatsby. i know i was supposed to. yes, it was assigned to us. i even know, more or less, what happens in the book. technically, i wrote an essay about it, i think, once or twice.
at the time, i hadn’t read any book assigned to me. ever. it wasn’t that i didn’t like to read. i loved reading. but homework took place in a function of my brain that i couldn’t access. i would sit in libraries or at my desk and just. not do my homework. i spent hours like this, days like this, years like this. just not doing what was assigned to me, no matter the consequences, no matter how badly i wanted to be doing it. i just wouldn’t. and i wouldn’t go to class because i didn’t want to deal with the fact i didn’t do the homework. and then i wouldn’t get the homework. so i didn’t do it.
i remember realizing while i was doing college applications that i had actually, real-life fucked up. that it was permanent, what i had done. that i had a C- of an average and no future to look rosy at. and i still couldn’t make myself do things. i tried to submit applications only to realize i’d shoved off the date to the very last moment. and i was fucked.
it takes me three years and two transfers and three new starts before i am actually real-life trained how to study, how to read, how to enjoy being assigned things.
and i watch parents of my students yell at students for being the same person i was six years ago: screaming at an A-, confused at skipped classes, punishing missed homework. and these students don’t have an answer. they just don’t do things. even if they want to. and they look at me, confused and defeated and without an answer for their parents. “i just can’t,” i hear a lot, and i understand.
parents don’t like “executive dysfunction” as a reason. “anxiety” and “depression” are often misdiagnosed as “procrastinating” and “lazy”. kids just learn they’re like this. that they’re always going to be. that it’s their fault, permanently. they are surrounded by books they didn’t read. and it doesn’t feel good. it feels like suffocating.
today i started “the great gatsby.” i promise. one day, it’ll feel easy.
I don’t usually reblog things that have nothing to do with RPGs, but I want as many people as possible to see this. This exactly applies to me, even to this day.
I agree with monstrous. I rarely post outside of ttrpg ideas and dragon stuff, but this is so god damn important.
With the start of 2018 well underway, I wanted to make a masterpost full of links on how to adjust your perspective with studying. Perhaps you want to become a better student overall, improve your focus or get into your dream college, there is always something we want to do better! Hopefully these tips will make 2018 your best academic year yet!
i knew in the 2nd grade that standardized testing was bullshit. harry potter book 4 had just come out and i was at a good part. harry had just put his name into the goblet of fire.
during the standardized test, we were allowed to keep a post-test book on our desk. i diligently got started on part 1: english. at the time, all of the answers went on the same sheet, but all of the questions were in different booklets. so i finish all my english questions, read in my extra time, and then it’s part 2: math.
i realize i have answered all of my english questions on the math portion of the answer sheet. at first, annoyed but undeterred, i’m like. okay great i gotta erase every bubble. but i get bored around question 5 of doing this because… like… harry potter is sitting on my desk and i could just give them the wrong answers. so i answer maybe 10 whole questions in the math portion, copy the english answers over to where they actually belong, and then crack open the book and call it a day.
i obviously failed. this is the real life, not a movie. my parents were called in. i had scored in the lowest percentile. i was bad at math. i was concerningly bad at math. i could have done better just guessing than how i did with the english answers.
if this was just a funny story, someone would ask me “why did you do so badly when you usually get fairly average grades” and i would have said “i wanted to read harry potter, not take this stupid test.” but it’s the real life, and nobody asked. instead, i was branded stupid and bad at math. i got placed in a lower math than i needed to be in; got bored, stopped paying attention. knew i was in the “worst at math” group, started saying “i’m bad at math” and 100% stopped trying because the further i fell behind, the worse i got. through the rest of my academic career – until senior year in high school, i never got above a c on a math test, because i was “just bad” at math.
i had undiagnosed adhd. the only reason i know now i have adhd is because at 22 years old, i finally went to a therapist, who effectively said, “are you kidding me you have the most obvious case of attention deficit i’ve ever seen.”
but nobody had been looking. my one test grade had given teachers permission to not look, because, obviously, i was bad at math. the one time i got 100% on a math test – that one time in senior year – i remember my math teacher looking at it and saying “it’s clear that if you just focused, you could do the work.”
in college i’d take a math class and i actually “just focused” for the first time in my life – meaning i treated math as a challenge, but one i could overcome with the skills i’d learned all on my own, through constant work and practice. i got the highest grade in my class. i still think i’m bad at math.
which makes me wonder: how many people got fucked over because of something stupid like “i was too preoccupied with harry potter”. who had nobody looking out for them. who slipped under the radar because – come on, aren’t some people just bad at things?
I was undiagnosed ADHD too and am also Bad at Math. I took the SATs in high school and remember being a bit shocked at getting an exactly average Math score because I was convinced that Math was just something I was terrible at.
Now that I know I’m ADHD I can recognize that math was boring because of the repetition and my tendency to not do my homework affected my grades. But I still can’t shake the Bad at Math feeling. I long ago gave up on any idea of pursuing science as a career because obviously, I’d need math for that.
Which is kinda sad because while I am Bad at Math I always kind of found how numbers work to be fascinating and maybe if I’d found a way to keep my interest I could have been good at it
Standardized tests were a source of frustration because inevitably I’d test in the 99%+ percentile on at least English and social studies but my grades didn’t reflect that so why didn’t I just try harder and focus?
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Very pleased that that the 4 page paper I kinda last minute pulled out of my ass about the Sherlock fandom got me a 97/100. I had to critically analyze a digital media work that shows how it’s digital format affects human activity. So I wrote about the fandom and how we use digital media, since I’m kinda well versed in that.
My favourite highschool thing ever was in our english lit class reading of Hamlet and we all had to play different characters and partway through everybody started reading it like a porno with breathy moaning voices and the dude playing the queen spoke in a drunken alabama accent and the teacher told us we were awful and that shakespeare would have wanted it that way
Do you ever write stuff for school and feel like a total pretentious bastard? I’m writing about the mis en scene in this scene and I can’t really help but use big words and I feel like the world’s biggest asshole, but at least I think it makes sense?
