4. Bad Habits
At 18 or 19 years old, you are hardly a blank slate coming into college. You have been in school for at least 12 years, and have learned a great deal. Some of what you know is a good basis for beginning your adult life. However, some of what you know is a barrier to learning. What are some of the bad habits you might have picked up?
You are probably sick of school. So far, school is something you have had to do like it or not. You had relatively little latitude in what courses you took or what instructor you had. College seems that way to first-year students as well because in your first year you end up taking a lot of the courses required for a degree, and depending on the institution most sections of those courses may be filled leaving you little choice over instructors. All of these things are incentive-killers, but at the same time you are now expected to bear all the responsibility. To whatever extent high school takes steps to make sure you graduate, in college you are allowed to fail. Don’t be in such a rush to take required courses. Courses that are prerequisites for courses in your major are important to take early. The rest can wait while you take a course or two that first semester or year that actually holds some interest for you.
It is a truism that, in general, anyone younger than you is more irresponsible. Without claiming that anyone in particular is “irresponsible” in an absolute sense, first-year student have spent all of their lives sheltered more or less from a certain degree of responsibility. Their parents have provided for most of their basic needs; their schedules and use of time is relatively structured. Not only that, we seem to live in a society which at times de-emphasizes personal responsibility, specifically in accepting the burden of consequences. When something goes wrong, how many times do we hear demands that political leaders “do something” to make it right again? How about the high school teacher in Kansas with many students whom she failed after they plagiarized an assignment, who was told to either give them another chance or submit her resignation? In high school, there is tremendous pressure to pass students and let them proceed to degree. For students in college, this tendency to believe in second chances often manifests itself in the request for extra credit, typically near the end of the term with the sudden realization that they are not doing as well as they hoped. As noted, many stories of the college experience do not have a happy ending. College comes with many new freedoms, and one of those is the freedom to fail. Recognizing that you now have the power of choice over your success in college is an important step to keeping up and staying with it, because you then realize that if you are to succeed in your goals you have to choose to do so. Second chances are rare, and even more rarely will you be able to start over fresh with a clean slate. Get behind, stay behind.
Another potential hazard is to treat college and grades as a great game. Record what the instructor says, remember it long enough to take an exam, wash, rinse, repeat. It might even include a guessing game…try to determine what the instructor will put on an exam and remember only that part so you can absorb as little as possible for the best possible grade. Cheating is just that…trying to change the rules of the game to get yet a better grade for yet less effort. To a certain extent, this is reasonable (except for cheating). Professors vary widely in what they think is important and how students should be able to express what they have learned, and as stated previously doing well means adapting to the needs of a particular course and instructor at the very least in terms of language. The problem is, if you get so caught up in the game it can actually be counter-productive to your learning. One thing to remember is that listen-repeat is generally an unsuccessful strategy in college. Instructors expect you not to provide knowledge as the answer to questions, but to use knowledge to answer questions. This goes back to the logic and causality aspect of language. Learning the “what” of things is generally insufficient; it’s the “why” and “how” that will get you father. Thinking beyond just the grading game will get you a lot farther, because frankly, grades aren’t as important as most students typically believe.