Comment by klyrs
2 years ago
When I was teaching, there were often a few students who rarely showed up to class, didn't turn in much homework, and when they did, it was only the first few questions. One such student asked me for a huge favor: erase his record for the semester and grade him purely on the final. I kinda stared at him for a minute, and asked him why I should do that. He said something about everybody deserving a second chance. I ultimately made a deal with him, because I wanted him to be motivated to try. He didn't show up to the final.
The thing about math and science is that you need to show up, you need to put effort in, you need to keep trying until you get the correct answer. And then you need to keep doing that. In my experience, nobody keeps trying if they think they can't do it. I have come to believe that pretty much everybody is capable of doing the calculations. But not everybody is willing to subject themselves to the grindstone.
I've seen novelists, songwriters, musicians, painters, etc say the same. The lesson I take from this is not that people need to learn when to quit, they need to learn to stop half-assing it with the expectation that things will eventually get easy.
Yours is a good point, but I can't leave this without comment. The sociological structure in which the actions are taken matter too. This student might have been fine in another educational structure (such as an apprenticeship, or however it was people learned in paleo- and neolithic times).
After dropping out a couple of times I found college was a lot easier as an adult. Not because I had grown, I don't think. But possibly because I had learned elsewhere, which made the courses easier, and definitely because I stopped caring as much.
I dropped out of college and returned as an adult as well. It wasn't until I took life seriously, and saw math as a necessary skill to achieve my goals, that I became willing to put the effort in.