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I have some similar issues, though I still breezed through college (prestigious school in 3.5 years, deans list, didn't "study"). I probably related that story here (and definitely did on reddit in one of those kids-called-gifted-where-are-you-now thread), so I'll spare us that story again. But where this really hit me was just two years after college, trying to write a large technical book (on HTML). I'm just now completing the task after 9 long months. It seemed like my mind broke, not because it was hard, but because of some other invisible wall. I still don't have the words for it. Writing about other things and reading other writing seemed to be the only thing that helped. It was easy to write about the topics of my expertise, but so much of the book was material that I had only heard of, and had to immerse myself in completely before I could even begin the task of writing. The project was therefore a set of many tasks within tasks. OP writes: > Regardless of whether or not they like or dislike the material, they break the challenge of studying for a test or completing an assignment into small problems, working away until they know, not think, but absolutely know that they are ready. There are four or five poems I read almost every day as a sort of cathartic ritual, and one of them is The Ladder of St. Augustine, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (of Paul Revere fame). The snippet that runs through my mind constantly: We have not wings, we cannot soar;
But we have feet to scale and climb
By slow degrees, by more and more,
The cloudy summits of our time.
The mighty pyramids of stone
That wedge-like cleave the desert airs,
When nearer seen, and better known,
Are but gigantic flights of stairs.
The distant mountains, that uprear
Their solid bastions to the skies,
Are crossed by pathways, that appear
As we to higher levels rise.
The heights by great men reached and kept
Were not attained by sudden flight,
But they, while their companions slept,
Were toiling upward in the night.
Some days its hard to open a text editor. I don't know why. But sometimes looking down at the stepping stones is more useful for moving forward than looking up at your goals or (sometimes worse) everyone else. I think of poetry and start the program.[1] http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Ladder_of_St._Augustine |
I've had similar issues as the OP, though at university I accepted lower marks than I could have gotten because I simply didn't want to go to class. I could learn the material on my own and use the time-savings to learn other things I was interested in. I almost always made top marks on exams, so it wasn't an issue (unless attendance was mandatory...)
I met a few people that had screwed off in High School, but for some reason had decided to take College extraordinarily seriously. I realized that for other people, material that would take me an hour or two to learn would take a solid 8 locked in the library.
As it turns out, after talking to some of these people, the problem wasn't that they weren't smart. It's that they didn't know how to learn, or had some misconceptions about what learning entailed. I've watched people slog through upper-level math classes by trying to memorize the relevant material, when they could have understood it in half the time, if they'd approached the material with the right mindset.
For a while, I was the OP. At least until I realized that if your goal is to beat your peers, or measure up to some arbitrary external standard, you probably won't. Even if you succeed, you'll make yourself miserable trying. On the other hand, if your goal is to learn, you'll do it. You might even stand a chance of beating out your peers. Unfortunately, something a lot of people don't understand about learning is that after a certain amount of effort, it just takes the amount of time it's gonna take. You can't really sit down and say "I'm going to learn x in y hours" and not be disappointed much of the time. Sadly, the education system all the way through College makes it seem like this is so.