Tell Me How It Feels to Be a Bad Student

I was a bad student in my 3rd grade private school. I was given a lot of homework and worst of all I had to write in my journal every day. I did not have the attention to do all this work (that was not as exciting as reading about DNA and rockets and black holes). My grades were really bad.

My parents couldn’t afford private school any more, so I started going to public school, which had almost zero workload, and I was rapidly crowned “the smartest kid in school.” It was freaky!

I probably don’t qualify because I was not a habitually bad student (I was lazy sure, but not bad), but I did go from dean’s list to flunking dropout sophomore year of college…because of a girl…to whom I’ve been married for 14 years now, so I can’t say the experience felt miserable then or now.

I may be wrong, but I’ve always had the impression that the majority of “bad students” (as opposed to kids with behavioral problems and suchlike, which seems different from what you are meaning by the term) were only bad in the sense that they preferred expending their efforts on other things–video games, the opposite sex, sports, etc. At least for this kind of bad student, they ended up doing what they preferred so it couldn’t have been that miserable, no?

My impression is the same as Dave’s. When people are bad at something, they either didn’t try, or they quickly say they didn’t try. It’s not so bad.

The times it hurts are when your friends all want to do something, and you can’t seem to figure out it. The the knife lands true, because unlike with teachers, you can’t so easily blow off your friends and say you don’t care about things they care about.

Usually this latter case is not an academic subject. It’s knowing popular dances, or dressing right, or knowing the right parts of pop culture trivia.

I too was a bad student. Due to laziness and indifference. When I gave a damn I did great in school.

In HS I would just not turn in the work or turn it in in a sloppy manner, I would not study much for test but I generally did pretty well on test anyway because I am pretty smart. If a subject did not interest me I would put forth ZERO effort. If it did interest me my teachers loved me because I could be very engaged. I failed a couple quarters in HS and middle school but would always get scared straight in time to pull it out.

In college I once failed every class I took besides PE in a semester. I just partied and did not show up for class.

Once I became and econ major things turned around as I was interested in it and it took very little work. I convinced them to let me into grad school on a trial basis and then I really kicked butt because the material interested me and I had a chip on my shoulder to show that I belonged. Also I met my wife who was a positive source of motivation. Now I have two masters degrees. Go figure.

How did it make me feel? Well I felt like I had let my parents down and it made me depressed when I finally got my grades. I usually resolve to be better the next year/semester and usually did, but once I started doing well I would start slacking off again. I never really felt like I was dumb because I usually knew the material or had put forth no effort. But I was generally down on myself about how lazy I could be.

This won’t earn pity points but I was also the classic “smart kid, bad student”. Most of school just felt like an endless, pointless series of hoop jumping completely detached from anything that mattered in the real world.

I was lucky that I had the IQ that I could get past tests by paying moderate attention in class and figure things out as I went along. And I could occasionally whip out a homework assignment in homeroom or on the bus ride to school.

But anything more than that was just abject hell / drudgery / emotional turmoil. Even now – decades since – my skin crawls thinking about the complete uselessness of everything I was being forced to do.

So, I’m very sympathetic to “bad students” of all kinds and cheer everytime I see a drop out IPO or Google rigorously prove how even within their storied workforce, Grades != Performance.

I was bad in math, relative to my peers, in high school and college. I found proofs frustrating, the seemingly arbitrary rules about how to derive calculus incredibly difficult to memorize, etc. The only reason I passed college calculus at all was because I had learned a different way of handling derivatives in physics.

It was relatively humiliating, but I mostly just accepted it ‘John is bad at high level math’ and focused on what I was good at – software.

I graduated from engineering school 27 years ago with a 2.3 GPA. I suppose that makes me a bad student because my grades were low but 90% of the freshman who entered didn’t graduate. Many chose business school because it’s easier. My grades were low partly because I rejected the legitimacy of grades and partly because I worked outside of school. I think students should grade teachers but teachers should not grade students. If employers or others want to know whether someone is worth recruiting then they should choose an organization other than a college to evaluate candidates or they should perform the task internally.

Let me say a bit more: in addition to attending fewer classes and reading fewer textbooks, I also started to prefer the company of people who were not in my program, as these people weren’t talking about the classes I wasn’t paying attention to, wouldn’t care that I was a bad student in my program, etc.

So I grew less and less engaged in my own program, to the extent that by the time I graduated I did not have a single friend left among my actual classmates: but I had many friends among the undergrads or in other grad programs.

I guess what I’m hinting at here is that there’s a spiral effect, where being a bad student leads you to be an even worse student by destroying your engagement in your studies.

Add another to the “smart but not living up to potential” category. In my head I would calculate the opportunity cost of my time for each grade level (before I knew what opportunity cost was). Example: for a D: 0 hours of work per week. For a C: 1 hrs. For a B: 2. For an A: 4. The sweet spot was inevitably about a C. I never cared what others thought. Perhaps that isn’t correct. . . I would actively fight others’ expectations. I would seek out conflict, so I would often shrug off criticism. I didn’t care what others thought because I thought I was smarter than all of my instructors, up until college.

An exception to this was the Post-Calculus level Probability Theory class to cap out my Mathematics minor. I put in incredible amounts of work and rework; research and practice. My grades in other classes dropped as I turned my attention to this actual challenge. . . and a D was my reward.

At the time, it was devastating. The professor was great. My classmates worked hard and got A’s and B’s. I had no excuse, save my own academic inadequacies. This was the event in my life that proved that I could give my all and still fail.

Looking back, it was a turning point. I didn’t ‘buckle down’ or begin chasing the A’s, but rather I realized that those students that passed were amazingly intelligent and driven; more than I could be. It made me respect my colleagues and that continues to this day.

-Analytical Chemist, MBA

I’d say it depends on what you mean by ‘bad’ student. One that does not produce or one that doesn’t work. In my HS and college days, I was rarely one that didn’t work (except in ones where it was easy to produce or I was going to pass while doing the minimums). Being the one who can’t produce is frustrating and will eventually turn you into one that won’t do the work either.

I have been bad at a couple of different subjects, especially at first. The worst part (for me) was not knowing how to improve.

It can be very frustrating and I had to channel that into either working harder or cutting my losses. I also had to optimize my time and class schedule, given time and resource constraints.

I was a bad student in a handful of subjects and did very well in others. That difference upset me before High School but I got over it by learning to tell myself: “I don’t like those subjects and don’t care if I do poorly in them. I’ll just do better at the subjects I care about.” Thus, I reallocated study time from the subjects I was bad at and detested to those that I was good at and enjoyed – creating even more lopsided grades, decreasing my anxiety, and increasing my enjoyment of school.

Hence I barely passed in chemistry (thanks to the intense tutoring of my science-whiz high school girl friend) while getting very high grades in history, the biological sciences, economics, political science, English, German, and some math courses.

Learning subjects I enjoyed was more important to me than maximizing my GPA.

I failed the 1st grade twice and the second grade once. It was pretty awful. I was punished by my parents and threatened by my teachers. The school eventually gave me an IQ test and I evidently did pretty good which made them put even more pressure on me to work harder and do better, but I hated school and every aspect of it. I was made fun of and humiliated by other students. I end up hang around with some bad characters who picked on me.

A little antidote:
I hated school so much that I started to raise my hand all the time to go to the rest room. When I go to go I would waste as much time as possible going and come back very late. After a while the teacher would ignore my raised hand and so I remember one day peeing my pants in my seat and being humiliated by the children around my laughing.

In the 3rd grade I started to turn things around and I wound up graduating from college. In the 3rd grade they sat next to the best student in the class for him to help me, which began a long friendship. He and I went to college together and ironically I graduated and he did not.

BTW I am still very bad at spelling and writing which was a big problem then.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but comedians are often exceptionally clever and were by all accounts good students. Many big comedians in the UK attended Oxbridge.

I can’t say I was every a bad student, but my boyfriend is someone who is extremely smart and technically skilled, and yet, dropped out of high school, like Edward Snowden. He definitely has a lot of insecurities about his intellecual abilitys. And yet this is a guy who has: run a science fiction convention, produced a public access television show, ran underground computer hacking BBSes in the 90s, hacked into telephone lines for fun as a “phone phreaker”, probably knows as much about computer security as Edward Snowden, was involved in several internet startups, and constantly follows new technology tech on Ars Technica and Hacker News amoung other things.

And yet … he thinks that nobody will hire him because he has no degree and he’s been unemployed too long.

Whether I did well or poorly was largely determined by whether I could successfully apply my preferred method of learning. At some point at school, I got slightly ahead of my fellow students, probably by developing a faster reading speed. This gave me more free time in class, and, having nothing else to do, I read the textbook. This put me further ahead and widened my lead – teachers considered me intelligent, but much of that was because I had read the textbook cover to cover ten times (since I did well in class, they didn’t care if I read during lectures, whichever were usually short, anyway). This method didn’t work well in classes that required arts and crafts projects (much of middle school). I was bad at them and I wasn’t learning anything new, so I did poorly every time I had to do them, unless I could make my partners do the work instead. (In those lucky situations, I provided them with all the necessary information, so it wasn’t like I didn’t do anything.)

This approach didn’t work at college at all. First, I couldn’t read the textbook during lecture, both because the professors wanted everyone’s attention, and because they taught things that weren’t in the textbook. Second, the instructive quality of the texts worsened – instead of the clear explanations of my high school textbooks, my college textbooks explained things tersely and didn’t give many examples (where relevant). Third, I had difficulty paying attention in lectures, not having had any longer than 15-30 minutes before college – so my mind wandered and I didn’t get much from them. Fourth, I didn’t particularly try to read the textbooks cover to cover, because I couldn’t in class and had more fun things to do outside of class.
There were other differences as well. In high school, I had a reputation for being one of the smartest people at school in years, and I was willing to work to maintain that reputation, as well as to compete with other good students. College, where I started out average, inspired no competitiveness in me. Also, I felt somewhat embarrassed to go to office hours to talk to my professors when I had trouble. As a result, my grades were quite bad.

In the end, I graduated on schedule – but just barely.

My first grade report card said (paraphrasing), “Roman has incredible potential, but only does what he needs to do to get by.” This is the theme that I carried into adulthood. I would procrastinate to have fun which felt great, but the inevitable doom of showing up unprepared with marginal, sometimes incomplete work was horrible (albeit, not horrible enough to change my behavior). The feelings that come to mind are: Inadequate, shameful, wasteful, embarrassed and fear. I was a chronic underachiever who only applied myself to classes that I was interested in. I had no self-discipline. I always got A’s in civics and social studies…sometimes A’s in math if the teacher was engaging, but that was rare. By the age of 17 I had dropped out and was drinking alcohol every day. By 18 I was addicted to heroin. by 23 I had been arrested several times and did my first prison stint. Against all odds, I got sober at 25. I don’t know if this is indicative of my intelligence, or how low the GED bar is, but I took all five tests (Math, English, Science, Social Studies and one other I can’t recall) with no preparation at all, and got 90% or higher on them all. I’ve developed a career and have a comfortable life…I earn in the 80-85th percentile…I still have feelings of shame around this today…thank God I was born in America. Had I been born elsewhere, I doubt I would have found my second chance. My dream in life is to earn a degree in economics from GMU. But I am a little long in the tooth, and providing for my family takes precedence. So I’ll instead settle for reading EconLog 🙂

Well, school came easy to me but I can contrast that to my cousin who was a year behind and probably what you mean by “bad student”. He was always in trouble. My aunt was at school at least every week. I know now he has dyslexia and still requires intense concentration to read. Guess my brother and my idea of giving him porn to read was an effective solution. Even back in the ’70s they wanted to dope him but his mother refused.

My aunt and I were discussing school not long ago. She told me a story about my cousin. The teacher announced the search for student to write for the school paper. My cousin took his application up to her but this moron of education embarrassed him by telling him he needed to learn to read first. Well, this earned her two days of having a chair kicked all during class. My aunt was called. She had to point out to the principal and teacher why she was getting paid back for embarrassing him. But she did put a stop to it.

Now, lest you think my cousin wasn’t smart, I’ll just point out, after his knew blew out playing college ball, he got his degree in exercise physiology, worked for a sports medicine group, trained olympic athletes. His mother, a nurse, tells of being floored when she sat in on a class he was teaching to see her kid who student life was a battle, write foot-long medical terms on the board as he explained them to the students.

You won’t find him here as he doesn’t understand why I waste time on blogs.

I would hypothesize the “bad student” suffers a lot of embarrassment and act out in retaliation. Not to mention settling into a sport to gain positive attention in school.

I’ve always been exceptionally lazy so I have, obviously, always been a bad student. But there was a time when I became an exceptionally bad one….

I was doing A Level maths….about equal to freshman or sophmore level at a US university. You get properly into calculus, you’re integrating and so on.

And I simply stopped understanding what the subject was about. I could do the stats side of it, no problem. And I could work through the calculus problems: as long as I knew exactly what technique was to be used I could crunch through to get the numerical answer.

I even knew, conceptually, what we were trying to talk about, rates of change and so on.

But none of it actually made sense. I then found out that some of my peers could read equations as easily as I could read a sentence in English. Take some 5 or 6 “thing” equation (a squared being one “thing”, b cubed being another say), I was at the language reading equivalent of “that’s a c, that’s an a, that’s a t so therefore they must mean “cat”” and they had roared through the sentence “the cat sat on the mat” to work out who it was opening the can of sardines in the kitchen.

This is something I could just never get. And as to composing equations I was simply helpless. Couldn’t get the hang of it at all. I actually ended up answering one (later, at college) financial economics question by writing five paragraphs of English rather than five lines of maths simply because I couldn’t understand the equations. Although I understood the question and how to get the answer (still recall the basics of the question. You have to borrow money at interest to buy dog food. You have to pay for petrol to go buy dog food. So, how much dog food do you buy each time you go? Obviously, where the interest you pay is equal to the cost of petrol.) I had absolutely no comprehension of the language of mathematics that people were trying to teach me.

The same is till true now. Put something into English and I’m usually fine with it. Start using mathematical symbols and I’m entirely, totally, lost. I just don’t think that way.

So, I could indeed say that I was a very bad maths student.

However, I would go on to say that this made me a rather good economics student. Laurence Peters and his Peter Principle. Everyone is promoted to their own level of incompetence. When I came across that when I was about 19 I understood it immediately. That’s what had happened to me in maths. Precisely because I could do the arithmetic and the stats I was urged on to do ever yet more maths and so met my level of incompetence.

Much the same happened to me in music. I roared through the lower levels of trumpet playing, good technique, nice timbre, got through what we call Grade VI no problems. But try as I might I could not crack Grade VIII (the sort of level you need before thinking about music as a university degree) because I simply could not get this theory of music stuff. How on earth do you tell the difference between a third and a fourth by ear? Transposing from key to key? Sing in tune? How do people do these things?

I’d learnt the Peter Principle personally, twice, before I was 18.

Ever since then I’ve really only done the things that I find easy and ignored or avoided the things I find difficult. Which makes me, in one sense, an appallingly bad student for it means that I’ve never bothered to work hard at understanding something: the basis of study of course.

On the other hand it’s also a perfect encapsulation of Ricardo on Comparative Advantage. Everyone should be doing the thing they’re least bad at. We are all better off for my not trying to use calculus to design bridges (or economies) after all.

I failed badly in most of the quantitative subjects during college (economics). People tend to think you are dumb, and that hurts a little bit. I was too much of an anarchist that time. I liked to learn and to think, but I was too much absorbed into existential questions, for instance. Understanding life, society and politics took too much of my time.

I dunno if anyone here will relate to me. I’m Brazilian, and you Americans seem to me to be rather pragmatic. I didn’t fully developed the sense of duty and responsibility until I graduated from college. Fortunatelly enough for me, to apply for a master degree here in Brazil, you need to take a very hard test. So my grades didn’t mattered, I just studied a lot of math and statistics and took the test (although even studying hard I didn’t got good a grade, hehe). I had the chance to fix my immaturity, then.

There is (sort of) a bad student experience that just about all teachers have: professional development. Professional developments are whole or half days where students don’t come in and teachers are supposed to be taught how to be better teachers. Alas, the content is usually atrocious–irrelevant or unrealistic. The presentation is often bad, too.

I generally shut up and grumble silently to myself. But I am constantly surprised by how rude many of my fellow teachers are, making cutting remarks or just engaging in conversation while the presenter is trying to get her material across. Stuff we hate when students do it in our own classes. I’ve even seen teachers doing grading in a PD.

I have said (originally in jest, now totally seriously) that the most important thing teachers get from most professional development is the thought, “Do my students feel as bad as I do now? Do they think my class is this boring and pointless? Do they want to get out as much as I do? I have to make sure they don’t feel like I do now.”

BTW: little of what gets “taught” in professional development ever gets used by the teachers who were “taught” it.

I as many others could give you the I am good but lazy student story. But I think your question is more inregard to how it feels to be a bad student. So I will focus my answer on that period, when I was not doing well.

It of course starts out with a feeling that you have it. This is boring, boring, boring but I know I have it. It then transforms to OMG there is a lot to do and I have done nothing. At this point I ussually had a 70% chance of pulling it out and getting a B on the final to get a C or 30% chance of not passing.

I had the most difficulty in classes like econometric modeling where everything appeared to me to be focused on a set procedural steps and context seemed to be missing.

My favorite example is after 3 days of lecturing on multicollinearity and the intricate means of calculating it. I asked the professor if the only example she selected to work through the whole process was statistically significant and her reply was “no.” Without hesitation or any thought of how much better it would have been to select an actual example, she proceeded to the next subject.

I think now it was my weakness, and know that more rigor even in the in vane would have been better for my future career. But I know had many classes where you have these moments where there is no contextuaul understanding, and I just did not believe the educational institution had any interest in intellectual learning. I completely agree, they properly identified me a student that would not follow directions when they seemed silly. I have mixed feelings of whether it served me to be a rebel or if it would have been better to conform.

In recent experience I tried John Cochrane’s Coursera Asset Management Course. Like most students out of my league, I just stop going.

As I read the comments, clearly the commenters’ ability was high even when their achievements were sub-par.

I was a terrible student in what was called Jr High at the time (7th, 8th, 9th grade) but like so many of the commenters I was also blessed for it was my choices not my ability that earned me the title.

The crescendo was Algebra in 9th grade; my parents got me a private tutor because I was failing and I became very good in the technical course work; but I hated the teacher and she hated me. I would do the homework but refuse to hand it in grade (0) every quarter. I would use techniques taught to me by my tutor when up at the blackboard that the other students did not yet understand. To me my job was to make the teacher look bad. I thought that an A on every test would get me a passing grade….It didn’t. I earned a 98% on the final exam, an (A) on almost every test and she failed me for the year.

I spent my summer peddling my bike 8 miles one way to summer school to be with the kids who actually couldn’t get it.

To this day I can’t come to a conclusion whether my 9th grade Algebra teacher was the best teacher or the worst teacher I ever had; we had a terrible relationship, but in my attempt to prove her wrong I became very skilled at the coursework which I use to this day.

On a side note it shows how education has changed since 1980; can any of you imagine the outcry today if a pin-headed but competent student earned a 98% on the final exam, A(s) on the tests throughout the year, and flunked. Back then it was her classroom.

I don’t know if I qualify as a bad student or not. In elementary school, we had two grades that we received. One for subject matter expertise and the other for effort. I would consistently get the highest marks on subject matter, and the lowest marks on effort.

What would happen is that during school, I would pay attention and learn what needed to be learned. But when it came to homework, I would never do it. I didn’t feel it was necessary to do the homework since I was pretty sure I learned the material. My parents pushed hard for me to do the homework anyway, which was, of course total drudgery.

I developed a true hatred for homework. I was able to get away with skipping homework and testing well all the way through high school. But when I entered college, it was a completely different experience. The study habits that I’d developed up to that point weren’t going to cut it in college. Unfortunately, it was hard to overcome the lack of discipline I’d cultivated. I’d grown accustomed to having a lot of freetime outside of the classroom, and I stubbornly refused to change.

In courses that were interesting to me, I still excelled. Doing homework in those courses was actually fun. So it felt like freetime. But in courses that were required, I would rarely pass, and I’d have to take the course again. Of course, taking the course a second time around made it much easier to pass. I eventually finished college by adding an extra year.

I thoroughly loved the social experience in college. However, I wish I could go back and apply a bit more discipline to the educational experience. I wonder what opportunities I would have now if I’d been more disciplined then.

Finding the interplay between discipline and motivation is the key. Like many, I do very well at things I enjoy, but cannot force myself to do something well if my heart is not remotely in it.

I was bright enough in pre-university school that I could just go to class, pay attention, and coast by with B+/A- grades, and at the time, this was good enough for me.

In college, I found myself incapable of studying hard because I had never done that before.

This caused me to reject academia as valid use of my time – By midway through my junior year I had enough credits for a BA in Econ and I was ready to get out and make something of myself, instead of wasting my time finishing core requirements at age 21.

I loved macroeconomics, and as I entered the professional world, I found blogging to be a casual, go-at-your-own-pace way for me to selectively view economic material as it suited my desires or natural motivations, rather than as part of a curriculum. After a year of reading mainly Yglesias, Sumner, Krugman, Kliein, Mankiew etc I realized I was way more engaged and could explain concepts I remember being forced to study like a machine for school, but now having a more real world application and forum for discussion. My ability to contend with family, friends, and co-workers in discussions has skyrocketted.

Cheers