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With a couple of major projects wrapped up, others delegated, and others dropped, I have found myself in a slow season.
First, I took a vacation. When I went to set the autoresponder on my email, I learned that I hadn’t done so since the summer of 2018. Yikes! Even if I didn’t go anywhere, this complete holiday from my laptop was necessary.
I further decided that, upon my return from my vacation, I would strip away everything from my to-do list that wasn’t essential.
Read MoreThe best advice I have is this: simplify.
If you don’t have any problems, you might not need this advice. That’s great! Otherwise, simplify.
You can reduce physical clutter in your physical environment. You can strip away the emotions from a decision that ultimately doesn’t require them. You can do less, slow down, and eliminate tasks, projects, and routines from your life.
Read MoreAn honors course is an opportunity to do extra work for the sake of proving that you’re a person who is willing to do extra work.
You can’t fake it and you can’t delegate it, both for the purposes of your own learning and for the credit due. There are no shortcuts. A top student must be thorough and conscientious. Efficiency is not a priority; the teacher doesn’t actually need 25 different papers on the same subject. Grasping an esoteric concept takes hours that don’t translate to productivity, per se—that’s not what it’s for. In academia, we’re not looking to accomplish things more quickly and easily. As in weight lifting, the point is the hard work and effort.
Read MoreLots of school assignments are just for show.
Even assignments with a legitimate objective will often be padded out with superfluous tasks to make them seem more interesting, substantial, or fun. But often, it just makes them take longer.
That’s how a first-grader finds herself doing an addition worksheet that requires, for instance, coloring each box based on the sum in order to create a picture of a flower.
Read MoreIt would be funny if it weren’t so sad. Students prep for this test for months, but it’s not for them. These students, each with their own desires and dreams, become data for someone else’s use. In the process, they suffer anxiety regarding the actual test and then experience an inflated or deflated sense of self-worth once the test scores come out. Some milestone. An entire year (or six) spent in the service of someone else’s goal, all the while being told that it’s theirs.
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