By
Dr. Mulder
Rule #1: This ain’t high school anymore.
Although
they might look alike sometimes, high school and college are dramatically different.
In college, we assume you are an adult. That means it’s up to you whether you
want to be here. It’s up to you to figure out why you are here. And it’s up to
you to decide what you hope to achieve here. It’s your education that’s at
stake, so if you want to throw it away, no one will stop you. In high school, I
suppose, teachers are supposed to help students who don’t want to learn and
make them want to learn, or just make them learn. In college, if you don’t care
about your education, no one else will. If you care about your education, there
are incredible resources readily at your disposal. And if you take some
initiative, there are many people eager to help you. But if you don’t care, no
one gets paid here to take you by the hand and show you how not to throw
your life away.
Rule #2: You have to take the initiative.
There are
incredible resources for you here, but they will sit unused and useless to you
unless you take action to go out and seize them. Talk to your professors. Ask
for help. Find out what the library has to offer. Find out how the college can
help you build your study and time-management skills. Find the writing center.
The college tries to inform you as well as it can of all the resources
available to you, but there will still be great resources that you won’t know
about unless you seek them out and ask lots of questions. You have to be
self-motivated and self-disciplined. Don’t sit back and wait for your education
to be handed to you on a platter.
Rule #3: No one else can do it for you.
No one can
magically give you an education any more than someone can just hand you
physical fitness. You don’t just plop down your tuition and automatically
receive an education any more than you can plop down money at a fitness center
and automatically be fit or just buy a workout video and automatically lose
weight. In all these cases, you have to do a lot of work. Others can help by
showing you how to do the work, but no one else can do the work for you. I hope
you realize Mr. Burns is a fool for having Smithers exercise for him.
Incidentally,
if you don’t have the knowledge and skills you are supposed to have in college,
no one can wave a magic wand and fix that for you, either. In college, we assume
that you have mastered the basics of Reading, Writing, and ‘Rithmetic, as well
as a lot of other things. Regardless of whether it’s your fault because
you slept through high school or the school’s fault because they didn’t teach
you what they were supposed to (oh my, never in California!!), if you have
catching up to do, no one else can do it for you. It might not be fair, but
that’s the fact. Take the initiative and use the resources available here.
Rule #4: Think of education the same way you think of
athletic training or musical training.
You can’t
just read the rule book and be good at a sport, or read about the clarinet and
be a great jazz clarinetist. It takes practice, practice, practice. And then
some more practice. In fact, you have to keep practicing for the rest of your
life, otherwise you lose it. Practicing means doing drills, and drills can be
repetitious and boring. Doing scales or working on your free throw for 45
minutes straight can be boring. Likewise, doing homework can be boring.
Lectures can be boring. Lectures and textbooks are not meant to be a form of
entertainment. In fact, the more entertaining they are, the more suspicious you
should be of them. If your coach has you do drills on your hook shot, and you
stop half-way through, complaining that you’re bored, your coach will just tell
you that you’re not good enough for the team. Likewise, if you tune out of a
lecture as soon as it gets boring, you’re gonna sink. The key to success is for
you to push yourself hard during drills, during practice, during
lectures, during your study time. There’s no substitute for your pushing
yourself hard. And, forgive the cliché, but “no pain, no gain.”
Other bits of advice:
I don’t want to administer punishments to those who break
the rules. That’s another aspect of high school teaching that keeps me from
teaching high school. There are simply consequences to your actions.
That’s the way the real world is. If you miss a class, for whatever reason,
you’ve missed something that cannot be replaced. You should do your best to
find out what happened, but you missed it and that can’t be changed.
Consequences cannot be undone. If you fail to study for a test and get a low
grade, you’re not being punished for being bad; the low grade is simply the
consequence of your actions.
Missing a deadline has consequences, too. In most
“real-world” situations, missing a deadline means you don’t get a second
chance. I don’t know of any job or career where you can get partial credit for
turning in something late. If you’re assigned a project that has to be in by
Friday morning, it has to be in Friday morning, otherwise forget it. I do my
best to be strict about deadlines to help prepare you for what deadlines really
mean to the rest of the world.
Plan ahead, don’t wait till the last week
of the semester if you are having problems. I generally get students who come
to me panicking about their grade either too early or too late. If you’re
disappointed with the first grade turned back to you, wait to see if the next
grade is better. There are plenty of grades coming your way. But if we’re past
the mid-term and you’re concerned about your grade, talk to me. I can’t do
anything to help you in the last couple of weeks of the semester.