'Underachievement' in school

Post Reply New Topic

I'm the same in this respect! I can do harder things, but when people ask me apparently veryeasy questions, even if related to the harder stuff that I've just done, I find it really hard :S.

I remember in GCSE German, Foundation did Sections 1 and 2, and Higher did Sections 2 and 3. Evidently, Section 3 is higher than 2. When I was doing my German revision, I always seemed to score higher on Section 3 than Section 2.

I have no idea how this makes sense.

I am the youngest of three kids, and wouldn't you know it? My older siblings made straight A's throughout elementary middle and high school. Meanwhile, In elementary school I was an A B student at best. When I started getting older a few C's and one or two D's crept in as well. My mother was furious. She had been so good in elementary school that she skipped grades, yet when she went to college she had a rough time and nearly dropped out. I think my mom was hard on me because she thought that if I was having trouble in high school, then college would be next to impossible for me. My mother chased down diagnoses of learning disorders for me, but I never believed any of them, and refused medication or treatment. I was sure there was nothing wrong with me. I wanted my mother to just accept me for the way I was. Eventually I just wore her down to the point where she just started calling me "stupid."

Here's the funny thing though. It's hard to explain the transition, but I kicked butt in college. In high school other people tell you what to take, other people tell you how to study, other people tell you what to do. In college I was finally free to be myself, and I discovered that I function much better on my own. Suddenly I had professors that wanted to answer questions like "because they're shorter than the wavelength, would ants be unaffected by this form of radiation?" Suddenly I was finding equations for things I wondered about as a child like "If I were kidnapped and thrown in a pit outdoors, but had a wristwatch that told me the day of the year and the time it was in my hometown, with what sort of error could I predict my longitude and latitude using the path of the sun across the sky?"
If I wanted to sit in the front row of my lecture and draw pictures all class, no one minded. If I wanted to rock back and forth and sing to myself as I studied in my dorm, it didn't matter to anyone else. It was the perfect system for a person like me. I did study abroad and graduated in the top of my class. Now I am the first person in my family who is chasing a PhD.

The word I hate most is: "unacceptable"

I hate it because teachers in elementary school used it for everything from low grades, to benign things like fidgeting or forgetting my pencil at home. It seemed to me that teachers who used that word often really just wanted students who were after their approval, that the whole point of school was not to increase knowledge and understanding, but to drink the punch and learn how to be "accepted" into some sort of group of "good kids." The whole idea just creeps me out. I liked to learn, but I didn't sign up for a cult.

Oh lord I majorly underachieved but I didn't know my condition then

I excelled in school growing up; however, since then I have mostly "underachieved." Based on my performance in elementary school and high school, everyone assumed that I would do awesome in college and get a great job. I made it exactly one semester in college my first time, and I made it exactly two months of that semester living in the dorms. The longest I've held a job is about 3 years, and I was on the verge of being fired when I quit.

One of my major problems was forgetting to turn in the homework. I did it, but sometimes forgot it. I think one of the major problems had to do with the teachers. If I had a teacher I liked, I did very well, but if I had a horrible teacher, I sucked. I got in a fight with one teacher because I was bored and she didn't know what to do with me. She wasn't challenging me, so I stopped doing the work and she didn't even notice for two weeks and I got more and more bored until I was flying paper airplanes in class. Then she cornered me and asked me what I wanted from her. I told her I wanted a different teacher. I got dragged into her office and berated for that.
Another thing that helped was having a person just as crazy as me to write notes to during class. I learned more that way.

I was an underachiever if I hated the subject and an overachiever if I liked it, except that I had to do a lot of handwritten work in those days and my handwriting was dreadful. I always got a giggle out of the term "apply yourself". I wasn't exactly sure how I was supposed to do that. I imagined rubbing myself against my schoolbooks like applying suntan lotion. I knew that couldn't be what it was, but I still didn't know how to do it. Nobody would tell me anything specific.

In elementary school I was one of the worst students in my class despite the fact that I did well on tests and evaluations. I did poorly because I was bored with my schoolwork and had no motivation to do well. Then in middle school, my grandparents promised me that if I did well they would reward me for my efforts (these rewards typically had to do with one of my interests) and I've done well academically ever since.

I somewhat underachieved, I suppose...not sure if that's quite the right word for it though. I was horrible at math so I am not sure how I got through that, I was able to write essays pretty easily and so I basically put more effort into what I was good at and did what I could for the rest and was able to get decent grades usually C and B realm but lower a few times and then I had As in some classes. I found most of it to be pretty boring and time consuming, I feel like I wasted a lot of time that could have been spent better stuck inside a building being taught about mudane crap.

Yep. My mom says she "never saw [me] study," thus, I "didn't apply myself," which is true to an extent because I didn't put a whole lot of time and effort into homework and studying for exams. That was partly because I was able to read a textbook chapter once and retain enough to do well on the exam, but as a result I never learned "proper" study skills. I spurned the culture of "do whatever it takes to get into a prestigious school," but I knew what I needed to do to do a good job.

I spent an average of six hours a night doing homework through middle school. I failed classes regularly and the teachers told me I wasn't trying. One of the problems was that my handwriting gets progressively worse as I write. (This is because my finger bones dislocate from writing.) I hated school...

I'm at school now and I like learning, but if something is boring I switch off. For example, I have barely ever revised for a History test because I find it interesting but I have to revise loads with other subjects.

I did extremely well at first, but declined the closer I got to high school.

From what I gather, I got by on my naturally high intelligence, being able to figure things out on my own, but later on when subjects became more complicated and that wasn't enough, I just didn't have the motivation to apply myself and augment it with study. The only real exception seemed to be science, but that was always my favorite and remains a great love of mine to this day.

Strangely enough, now that I've been out of school a dozen years, I strive to learn whatever I can, whenever I can. It may have just been that the learning environment wasn't conducive to my success.

This. I hated what I considered to be 'busy work' aka 'why should i write a spelling word 10 times and use it in a sentence if i can already tell you what it means?'


My elementary school teachers in conjunction with my mom, worked out a very elaborate system of cross-subject rewards for me. So if i did the busy work in one subject, I would get extra time in something I enjoyed more, or I got time to do more with my stamp collection etc.

In Middle and High school I did not do nearly as well but had some self-awaremess about needing to do the boring stuff anyhow, which I lacked as a young kid.

University was better, since it was subjects I had a choice in.

I still hear such sentences, but I can say one thing:
BOREDOM.
I never did much for school, usually have acceptable exam results anyway. It's just how they present the knowledge to me, I don't like it and am bored most of the time.

And then there is the oral mark.
I feel like a parrot or some recorder that has to playback what the teacher says - this is 50% of what my marks are supposed to consist of. Ridiculous!
Sometimes I even end up questioning the questions because the answers seem so... obvious to me, in the end I rarely question them aloud or even answer them. The most common thing that happens is that I'm irritated and just ignore what has been said. The most recent thing I can remember was "When does a year begin?", I mean, really?! That was a serious question!

When I had to do special tests so I could get a mark (due to missing a lot in school, health issues), I can say that I enjoyed this much more than regular school. The way school would be exciting for me would be if I was alone with the teacher discussing the topic, which is how the "test" in my art class looked like. While they needed a month or two to discuss those topics, it took me less than 45 minutes and I didn't even learn a bit and got a good mark for that. A pace that I liked, a whole different level. If this is how private lessons looks like, I'm going to become depressed because then I wish we had the money so I could have had that kind of education back then.

I can't explain this situation, but even writing about it drives me crazy. I feel like I'm an individual who doesn't fit into a classroom with others and who can hardly learn stuff the way others do, the learning methods don't appeal to me, they create a disinterest.

THIS. ^^

Sounds like a perfect recap of my school years...

I also had the problem that I got reasonably good grades without much effort, C's with very little effort and B's with some effort (Norwegian equivalent), so I had just skated along up until my last few years of school, then work got more demanding and I didn't really know HOW to make an effort, I'd never had to before.

Last edited by Fluke83 on 22 Jan 2013, 1:25 pm, edited 1 time in total.

This.^^