Most college
students tend to share similar feelings of anxiety mixed
with hope towards their first day of
class. Everyone... even
the worst of students... tends to enter "back to
school" mode with a genuine sense of motivation. Many
of us become ironically eager to purchase new textbooks, to
see new teachers, and to adjust to a new schedule. We even
convince ourselves that we are going to excel this
semester... that we are going to live up to our "full
potential" and score perfect marks even if we've
never come close to doing so in the past! Hours later, we
own at least a few of our books... we've looked over a syllabus
or two..and we've begun to plot out an easy path to
success: 40% for the mid-term, 50% for the final... 10%
for an essay.. no problem... we can hack it...What could
possibly go wrong?
What usually goes wrong is poor
planning. Overly-creative, highly intelligent students
begin each semester with genuine hope and personal promise
but typically end the semester with a sense of
underachievement and dissolution that had begun to set in
even before mid-terms. Understand that when a professor
hands out a syllabus, it is essentially serving as a contract between teacher and
student-- as a mandate for what is to be expected and as a set
of guidelines dictating how the student's work will be evaluated. But on paper it all looks so
simple: This quiz
will earn us this many points... that exam will add on that
many points...Syllabi tend to give students an
illusionary sense of ease because they enable us to
visualize the entire semester on two or three sheets of
photocopied paper. Syllabi do not, however, have the
ability to show us the in-between days... the work that
must be done at home... the long hours of laboring
necessary to achieve a perfect score on each exam. And so
we subconsciously note the date that first test will take
place and wrongly allow ourselves to slip into a state of
academic ease until just a day or two before test
time...when we realize we don't know the material well
enough to even get a "B."
How can a student avoid this? Don't look at the
whole semester right when you first get your syllabus.
Break each semester down into little, sub-goals first. You
wouldn't leap up an entire flight of stairs...you'd walk
them each one at a time. The same principle applies here:
Don't even look at the first quiz or test yet.. it's
probably still a long way off in the grand scheme of the
academic term. Look on your syllabus at the FIRST
lesson to be taught. Worry about how to excel at THAT
lesson and ONLY at that lesson. Don't think of the mid-term
or any other assessment yet to come. Concentrate only on
what is to be expected of you in the very next class and
focus all of your time and energy on achieving a mastery
over that one subtopic. Do this for each class and when it
finally does become time for an examination-- you'll hardly
need to study... you'll only need to "review."
The secret is truly in the psychology and it's far easier said than done...
We challenge you to make it happen this school year!!!
