<p>My husband and I are major slackers in high school ( compare to our D) but we did finish graduate school and undergraduate(with honors). We are both not morning person, maybe that is where she gets it from, so I’m not too worried. I’m more focusing in long term results.</p>
<p>Well she just got the Jr year report card and managed to get all A’s and B’s. Hanging right at that 3.5-3.6 range. Sadly, she admits that she put forth very little effort and she is fine with the results so why kill herself to do better.
I reminded my husband that when we were teens we probably felt the same way - she is who she is and I accept it. As long as her goals and expectations fall in line with her level of intelligence and effort I guess she’ll be ok.</p>
<p>If you want some hope, I got a C+ in both physics and pre-calc junior year after being a 3.6 student 9-10. I was stressed and hated life. So, senior year I quit band (hated it), found some new friends, got a boyfriend, went to football and basketball games, took classes I liked (AP calc, AP comparative gov’t, AP english, AP physics, computer graphics, and weight training), grew a better relationship with my parents, and grew some self-confidence.
I go to UVA engineering now.</p>
<p>Trust me, there’s hope for those who bomb junior year. It’s a horrible year for just about everyone. Just remind her that life isn’t over, at all, and tell her to do what she needs to do to enjoy senior year and do well by her standards.</p>
<p>Truthfully, I think that in the long run, the bright B+ student with the relaxed attitude is probably better off – they are on the road to a less stressful life. They probably won’t ever win a Nobel prize or get elected president… but they will probably have a higher level of job satisfaction if they aren’t stressed out worrying about competing for top spots, and they will have a better home and family life if they aren’t driven to exhaustion by their careers. </p>
<p>So yes, we should be proud of our high-achievers… but I think we also need to be very proud of the kids who have a more relaxed view of life, as long as they seem to be turning into responsible young adults.</p>
<p>“We just have a child who’s an unusual learner with little patience for the busywork that seems to persist in high school. Sometimes, when I see his assignments, I can’t really blame him for feeling that way.”</p>
<p>My daughter is that way. She missed 9 out of 10 assignments in her favorite subject because they were boring. She still managed an 88 in the class because she wrote a 3000 word research paper, complete with PowerPoint and 10-minute speech. Just will not do th busy work and we can’t get through to her about it.</p>
<p>“I also have a daughter like this. Freakishly high SATs and a respectable, but nowhere near perfect, GPA. You know the potential is there and it’s frustrating. When mine is passionate about something and applies herself she achieves such great things…”</p>
<p>Mine is just like that. I’m ok with the GPA in theory, but I seriously find it unacceptable that she doesn’t do homework when she has a teacher who will let her slide. I just can’t tell you how much that annoys me – and she has to sign a contract with each major subject teacher agreeing to do her homework, so she’s violating that agreement too!</p>
<p>zooser–she’s pushing the boundaries and getting away with it… like a typical boy. If she goes into any sort of competitive field, I predict she will do quite well for herself. </p>
<p>Too many girls get the daring drummed out of them.</p>
<p>"zooser–she’s pushing the boundaries and getting away with it… like a typical boy. If she goes into any sort of competitive field, I predict she will do quite well for herself. </p>
<p>Too many girls get the daring drummed out of them"</p>
<p>She is a typical boy, although cute as buttons. And daring as all get-out. I love that about her, but I want her to do her homework.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Based on recent history, it doesn’t appear that you should rule out the presidency.
:-)</p>
<p>Pretty much anyone with a decent IQ can get good grades in HS. Where is the fun in that? In over 30 years or working nobody has ever asked me about my HS grades but SAT’s come up once in awhile. I think many people see that as a more relaible sign of real smarts.</p>
<p>^^^
I have to admit, when I’m talking to someone my age and they reveal that they scored very high on the SAT, sometimes it’s kind of shocking (as in, “hey, I didn’t realize John was that brilliant!”)</p>
<p>Not that it happens often, but it has in the past. OTOH, Someone telling me that they were in NHS…OK, so what?</p>
<p>There is NO cause for alarm.</p>
<p>CC is just as kooky as freerepublic.com. The scary thing: I once drank the Academic Performance Cult Kool-Aid back in the day. The scarier thing: Although I’ve long since defected from the cult, people today drink FAR MORE of the Kool-Aid than I ever did.</p>
<p>I graduated from high school in 1992 as salutatorian. I was a National Merit Finalist, and I took Honors/AP classes to the hilt. I vied for admission to Stanford and MIT. I was the equivalent of a typical CCer back then. But compared to today’s students on this board, I was Ferris Bueller or Zack Morris. No, I didn’t grow up on the backroads of Mississippi.</p>
<p>I am disturbed by the rise of the Academic Performance Cult, and the irony is that this mania has bubbled up years after I defected from this cult. (I didn’t get into Stanford or MIT. I also noticed in college that NOBODY cared about my previous academic background.) I would not have survived undergraduate school if I had continued my intense attitude from high school, because I would have been up all night every night instead of sleeping at least 7 hours per night most nights like I actually did (and this was in electrical engineering at UIUC). The same applies for graduate school, where I earned my Master’s Degree in electrical engineering at George Mason University.</p>
<p>I have (by CC standards) skeletons in my closet. Some “lowlights”:
- I was the first casualty of AP US History in the 1990-1991 school year at my school. The workload was TORRENTIAL. The class had more assigned work than all my other classes combined, and I was taking Honors/AP classes to the hilt. This forced me to switch into the regular US History class. Of course, nobody in college cared which US History class I took.
- As an undergraduate student, I was in the bottom of my class for a few classes. I wasn’t firing on all cylinders (GPA of “only” 4.13 on a 5-point scale, or the equivalent of 3.13 on a 4-point scale). Nobody at work cared.
- I just barely earned my MSEE (GPA of 3.03) and graduated at or near the bottom of the class. (This was because I studied a different area than my undergraduate electrical engineering specialty and also because I did a time-consuming independent study project and an even more time-consuming research project when it would have been easier to simply take two classes.) Nobody at my workplace today cares about this.</p>
<p>So in the long run, whether or not you were a perfect student won’t matter.</p>
<p>Some things I’ve read on these forums are really disturbing. Some examples:
- Hypercompetitive pre-schools: This is CHILD ABUSE!
<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=187035[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=187035</a> - Someone who hates math is considering skipping AP Calculus AB and thus going from Pre-Calculus to AP Calculus BC: I was the math whiz at my school, Calculus BC wasn’t available, and the idea of skipping AB would never have occurred even to me.
<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=203572[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=203572</a> - A high school frosh with a BLACK belt in karate thinks she has an inferior EC record
<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=204985[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=204985</a> - Some students SKIP LUNCH in order to take more AP classes: NOBODY at my high school ever considered this.
<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=42900[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=42900</a> - An 8th grader is concerned about the SAT: Come on, even I never thought about the SAT when I was in 8th grade, and I was probably the only student at my high school who knew about the Princeton Review. By the way, preparing for the SAT is MUCH easier than doing well in school.
<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=44526[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=44526</a> - A student in a position most students would kill to be in feels SO LOST:
<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=45299[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=45299</a> - Pre-Calculus REQUIRES summer homework: I took Honors Pre-Calculus during my junior year of high school. We didn’t have to do homework during the summer. I aced AP Calculus, earned a 5 on the Calculus AB AP exam, and went on to earn my Master’s Degree in electrical engineering. If I could learn Pre-Calculus without having to do summer homework for it, why can’t today’s students do the same or simply not take the class if they don’t belong in it?
<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=28615[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=28615</a> - A student with an SAT score of 730 verbal, 800 math, and 770 writing retakes the test: I responded, but I felt like I was among Unintelligent Design kooks.
<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=147273[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=147273</a> - There was a long thread about tricks for getting up in the morning on time. I was the first one to suggest going to bed earlier and getting at least 7 hours of sleep in the first place. Many people seemed to dismiss this as a kooky concept.
<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=147696[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=147696</a> - There are students who feel the need to drug themselves up to study more, as if being a drugged-up A student is better than being a healthy B student.
<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=201245[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=201245</a> - Some students think that cheating and getting away with it is OK but earning a lower grade is the mark of a scumbag.
<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=161071[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=161071</a></p>
<p>MY ADVICE FOR CC STUDENTS HERE:
All this makes NO SENSE. Just sit back, relax, and be content to be one of the top 10% of students in the nation. Even if you are the PERFECT student, Ivy-type colleges can still reject you. College admissions is a 2-tiered system: There’s the normal tier where having sufficiently high stats gets you in automatically, and there’s the crapshoot tier where having sufficiently high stats merely gets you considered, and most of those considered don’t get in. None of the colleges in the normal tier have Ivy-level stats. The obvious conclusion is that once your stats meet a certain level, doing better doesn’t really open up additional options. This is the Law of Diminishing Marginal Returns at work.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>But neither will I 
And neither will 99% of people who got all or mostly As. In fact someone who probably didn’t will be president or win a Nobel prize anyway. I’m not that stressed out either. This is just how I roll. It’s cool. I do see people with a lot of external pressure to succeed, and I think it’s that that can cause stress. Also some people are just more prone to stress and perfectionism and need to consciously keep themselves in check, but it’s not really any different than being a “slacker” who has to keep their tendencies in check. You shouldn’t really be doing anything you don’t want to (within reason obviously, you need to generally follow societal establishment). And, obviously, you shouldn’t do things to either extreme that are harmful to yourself. But I would have had to have woken up at 6 in the morning anyway no matter what grade I got, so I figured I may as well have made the best of it, it didn’t really stress me out any more.</p>
<p>Gosh, you’re describing my son. Except he had good scores in math and not-as-good scores in verbal. Never got above 86 in French or below 84… got a 2 on the APUSH exam… solid Bs in English, As in sciences, math, computer science… graduated from MIT a few weeks ago. </p>
<p>Exactly what are you complaining about?</p>
<p>Some great posts and food for thought for all of us.
I hope I didn’t sound too disappointed in my D…just commiserating with the parents whose kids have natural ability and put forth little effort. Yes, they will be fine and yes they have other wonderful attributes. And their scores and grades are still very good - I think it’s the lack of effort ( which my daughter readily admits) that is somewhat annoying. On the other hand, I am happy that she isn’t all consumed with grades and stressed out about it. To be honest I wouldn’t want to bother with a lot of the busy work she doesn’t complete either.
Don’t worry - most of us parents know that our kids are fine - we just need a little confirmation and place to gripe a bit. Then we come back and thank our lucky stars for the wonderful kids we have and move on !
Have a wonderful July 4th everyone!</p>
<p>Nicely put^^^^ PA Mom. </p>
<p>In the grand scale of things, I think I am lucky to have a smart DD with a loving heart. While it is dispointing sometime when I saw the results that do not match capability. In the long run, it may not matter.</p>
<p>As the OP, I thought I’d chime in here. I agree with PA Mom: I’m not terminally disappointed. Things will turn out fine for my son. I’ve moved on to feeling protective. His Bs are really high Bs, so he’s doing the work. One of his teachers was just plain mean (and usually I’m not one to shift blame to the teacher). This may be off-topic, but: His school is 70% girls, and the boys get routinely trounced. The girls in his class know how to play the game; they know how to please teachers; and they are hyper-competitive with the boys, sometimes in kind of a nasty way. I know some of the posters on this thread have daughters who are like my son, so I’m not saying this is a universal issue. But the dynamic in his class makes it one. He says of a couple of girls: Sometimes I just want to tell them (in class) that I disagree with them, or that they’ve got the facts wrong, but what’s the point? (This also bothers me because he sees my H and me on a level playing field in our family.)</p>
<p>As a geezer feminist as well as a geezer mom (with two stepdaughters and many nieces), I’m always protective of girls. But it’s been an interesting journey having a son. I’m looking forward to the supposed advantage that our guys have in college admissions just because they’re guys! :)</p>