The problem is that you weren't challenged enough early, so when it actually got difficult, you didn't have the mental tools to deal with having to struggle with a subject.
People who are used to having to do extra work, and get extra help, tend to do better when they're confronted with things they can't do immediately. They don't think there is anything wrong with them, and they know that they're capable of getting it in the long run if they work at it.
Both things can be true tho, cus burn out is a thing, like, After I started highschool and noticed the difficulty spike, I tried harder and worked more than I did before, and it helped, but after a while it just...became pointless? Like, i know I'm sounding very Nihilistic rn, but a good chunk of ppl have just, lost the will to keep going on, like, there is this push to make school a competition, and the constant fact that your grades define what you'll be when you're older, especially in current times, and just, everything...it's too much for some ppl
A lot of bright kids too didn’t realize that their school was struggling with limited resources and were so focused on stopping the majority of kids from falling behind that what they were bringing was enough to make them exceptional in that environment.
Then they get to college and suddenly everyone around them is good enough to be there, the professor isn’t just trying to get a class full of kids through the year but is actually challenging a room full of scholars. Suddenly, what was enough to be the best is now hardly enough
Pretty sure this is what happened to me because Covid and its aftermath was ongoing during high school, and I was able to get by with minimal effort. Going into college I didn’t have any skills with time management or studying or really challenging myself and I think that made me lose motivation really fast.
That's 100% how it was for me, I got straight A's k-12 and freshman year of university. Then I struggled with my next three(actually more cause I started going part time and working full time).
I never had to study until I got to sophomore year of college. I literally just did all my homework in class. I never took notes. And I had time to read a fuck ton of books while I was in class. I never studied for the act or sat. I just took them. And got really high scores.
When I was a sophomore i finally started struggling, I was finally taking notes, but I scrambled to do all my homework work hours before it was due. I was writing 10 page papers the night before and doing semester long projects 24 hours before they were due.
There were 3 classes I got nearly 100% in, but I didn't attend them because there was not attendance policy. Calc 2 the professor opened the entire semestera worth of home work on my math lab. I took a weekend and did the entire semester worth of homework with the help of khan academy. Stats with programming in r was the same except the professor had all of his lecture from previous semester up on YouTube. Then I did the khan academy thing for linear algebra.
I feel like it also has to do with realizing the end result of just passing and of acing a subject is exactly the same (for mandatory school at least in a lot of cases), and you might not need to put in any effort to just pass, while you need to pull out all the stops to ace it.
I personally had a lot of tools at my disposal that I ended up leaving behind when I realized I was gaining nothing by trying so hard, since I ended up in the exact same place as all of my classmates who got way worse grades (this was 12 year old me making those choices, so keep that in mind when you notice the blatant lack of nuance and long-term foresight in that logic)
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u/TheComplimentarian 24d ago
The problem is that you weren't challenged enough early, so when it actually got difficult, you didn't have the mental tools to deal with having to struggle with a subject.
People who are used to having to do extra work, and get extra help, tend to do better when they're confronted with things they can't do immediately. They don't think there is anything wrong with them, and they know that they're capable of getting it in the long run if they work at it.