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tvtech

 

when you are known for being #1 at something everyone expects you to perform a that level and challenges you all the time and that's just too much work for me.

Agree!

I vaguely remember explaining to one, "teacher" that I didn't do homework and aced the tests because I knew the material, and that's all that matters to me. She whined about marking my grades down to, "C" because of not doing the busy work when I deserved an, "A" for knowing the material. I just walked away.

That was elementary school. I did the homework in college because I HAD to do it to learn the material. Side effect: Honor Roll grades. Nobody ever found out I was there for the education, not the grades.

 

Agree!

I vaguely remember explaining to one, "teacher" that I didn't do homework and aced the tests because I knew the material, and that's all that matters to me. She whined about marking my grades down to, "C" because of not doing the busy work when I deserved an, "A" for knowing the material. I just walked away.

That was elementary school. I did the homework in college because I HAD to do it to learn the material. Side effect: Honor Roll grades. Nobody ever found out I was there for the education, not the grades.

Same attitude in school here. I did just enough work to get by. Learn the material until I was comfortable with it or to where I figured out it was total BS and and anything after that was by my choice.

Similar grade turnaround in college my first time around as well. I was almost always in the top three and occasionally #1 unless I had reason to believe the class was total BS relating to my chosen field.

 

You have to take BS classes to get the degree. The trick is to convince yourself that it's important...until 5 seconds after the final test.

 

I think I spent more time learning the marking schemes than the course content when I was doing the humanities at school.

Once you know what the examiners are looking for, it was relatively simple to spoon feed them.

 

Sometimes that works. Sometimes it doesn't. I had a philosophy teacher that I never did figure out.

 

My favourite test paper answer:

"Write an example of risk.

This."

 

I got only one B in graduate school. It was from a prof who explained that our grade would be based 60% on test scores and 40% on class participation. There were only nine of us in the class; one was a Korean who spoke no English ever in my presence. He never so much as grunted in class.

We all got a B on every test paper; they were returned with no marks on them other than the grade on the top of the first page. I don't believe the prof ever read my answers, and the other English-speaking class members believed the same about their tests.

At the end of the course, when the final grades were posted, everyone in the class (including the mute Korean) got a B.

 

I got only one B in graduate school. It was from a prof who explained that our grade would be based 60% on test scores and 40% on class participation. There were only nine of us in the class; one was a Korean who spoke no English ever in my presence. He never so much as grunted in class.

We all got a B on every test paper; they were returned with no marks on them other than the grade on the top of the first page. I don't believe the prof ever read my answers, and the other English-speaking class members believed the same about their tests.

At the end of the course, when the final grades were posted, everyone in the class (including the mute Korean) got a B.

I would certainly agree that that instructor was doing you and everyone else a disservice. Such folks certainly exist -- and it's a shame.

In all of my classwork, high school, undergrad, and graduate, I think I can, perhaps, come up with maybe three or four courses that I would classify as a total waste of my time. I can really only think of one college course that falls in that category and that was Technical Writing. I was actually excited about the course because of what I thought I would learn and very disappointed at the weak tea it turned out to be -- but I think that was probably more a reflection of the instructor that what the course was intended to be.

So have I just really been that super lucky in having always taken worthwhile courses? To some degree I suspect that may be part of it, but I think the main thing is that I've always loved learning anything. If I had been required to take a pottery class to get my degree I'm confident I would have grumbled about having to take it but walked away from having taken it satisfied that it was not a complete waste of my time (now, agreeing that it was not a complete waste of my money would have been different).

Given my experiences over the last few decades, I suspect that at some point I would have found some way to apply something I learned in that pottery class to an electronic design I was working on.

 

Some courses are BS. Some teachers are past being simply bad teachers, to the point of being evil. My chemistry teacher most enjoyed reducing people to tears in public if they asked questions. This is why I did NOT tell him that electrons have mass. He seemed to believe that his job was as secure as the percentage of students that got failing grades or dropped his course. The first day, there were 220 people in class. After 6 weeks (the time limit to drop a course with no penalty), there were 46 left.

His, "ace in the hole" was the Chemistry Lab Notebook. All year, we kept notebooks about out lab work. We were never told how we were doing or where we needed improvement. He merely collected all the notebooks at the end of the course, posted our final grades, and burned the notebooks. Even after the course was finished, we did not receive any information about how the notebooks were graded or where we could improve our performance. Judging from the average of my test scores and the extra credit assignments that I got bonus points for, my Lab Notebook must have been a "D-" or an "F" to drag my course grade down to a "C", but I'll never know.

He achieved stopping my chemistry education.

The total grade point average was calculated by multiplying the final grade in each class by the number declared as its difficulty level. A 5 point course with a "C" grade required at least a 3 point course with an "A" plus a 2 point course with an "A" to average out to the "B" level required for the status of, "Honor Roll".

I could get a 3 point "A" for every 3 point course that I got a "C" in, but I didn't have enough hours per week to achieve (2) "A"s for each 5 point course that only got a "C" grade. Having high grades boiled down to how many hours per week I had to study. I was supporting myself by working as an analog design engineer, so I didn't have the time that some other people had. I worked enough hours to pay for food and housing, but every Friday night that I spent with the band had to be accounted for as which class would only get a "B" or a "C" that semester.

The motto here is: "You get out of it as much as you put into it". If you want to get everything academically available in a course, you have to pay for it in terms of time invested.