As a kid. Say in grade school… Did you care about your marks?
Why or why not?
If not, did that ever change and what made you care?
I see that spelling wasn’t important to you…were school marks important to you? 
Yes they were, I was always rather advanced in school and anything less than an A or 100% ticked me off. Still does actually, though I’ve learned to live with 99s on occasion.
I’m not really a spelling nazi, but that amused me.
I had a bit of a chuckle too.
Oh, yeah - to the point that I was afraid to come home with less than a “B,” because it would mean my parents wouldn’t be proud of me. (That’s how I saw it then, anyway.)
Once, I got an “F” in a class because I lost my old homework papers (ones that had already been turned in & graded - I was supposed to turn them back in at the end of the semester in a notebook, for my final grade - WTF?) - I was hysterical! I mean, bawling out loud at school, not even caring if the kids made fun of me, because I was sure my parents would hate me for it. I was also sure it meant I could not go to college.
One of the few times my mom went to bat for me - she personally knew the school superintendent, and she went to him about it. He was appalled at the circumstances under which a student of my track record would be flunked. The teacher didn’t want to change it, but she finally relented and changed it to a “C” (still embarrassing to me, but at least not an “F.”)
I had straight A’s in elementary school because I knew I was the smartest one in the class and needed to prove it. In junior high, I didn’t care as much and I slacked off but got pretty good grades. In high school, I didn’t do most of my work at all and teachers literally gave me grades and usually good ones. Three times I pissed off a teacher right before grades came out and they failed me for the grading period by counting all the work I didn’t do against me.
In college, I worked very hard for my grades because it was a challenge and I had something to prove once again. I did fine my first two years but then I kicked it into overdrive and got near straight A’s my junior and senior year.
If a child is of the smart and calculating type, they really only need to make good grades for about 3 1/2 years out of 17 (assuming they want to go to a good college but not go to grad school). Slack all the way through junior high but then kick ass the first three years of college. Once that early admission Stanford letter, resume slacking through the rest of junior year and coast through college. Employers don’t look at grades anyway. Within that 3 1/2 years of actual effort, I am sure there are some good ways to cut corners as well by slacking on time-intensive projects that don’t really count for much.
Yes, very important. My parents grew up dirt poor and I grew up never getting anything I wanted, so I did what I could to increase my opportunities and try my best not only to excel but to really learn. I am extremely irritated by kids who jack off all through high school and have their well-known snobs of fathers bail them out and make sure they get into Ivy League anyway. I once heard a rich boy say, “I want to go to college to party, not to learn.” What an unappreciative ass.
:smack:
It started out as “When did marks become important to you?”…
So not only am I a bad speller, I’m also too lazy to backspace far enough. :o
Yes, they were and were so likely all the way back to kindergarten, but I have a type A personality.
Never. I tested off the charts, but grades never mattered. I always managed to pull a B- average, much to the disgust of my parents, teachers and counselors, who knew I was capable of straight A’s if I felt like it. It wasn’t until I returned to college that I performed to my potential, rating the dean’s List my last 3 semesters.
This is coming back to haunt me years later, as I struggle with trying to get production out of my own students.
I cared until I got to college, which was ass-backward. I probably worked or cared too much too soon. During the latter part of my senior year of high school, I found what cruising was like, and I don’t think I ever totally recovered. I did well in the classes related to my major, but not many others.
I cared more about graduating early than getting good grades. After 3 straight years of school (school semester+summer school) and some afternoon classes, I was so burned out that I really didn’t care much. I kept a solid B average, and did well enough to get into a relatively difficult program for college.
Only side effect is that now that I have free time where I am not in school, its next to impossible for me to actually do my papers/studying.
Nope. I was like Silenus - my standardized scores were always great, but I was unmotivated and such. More often than not, I just would do whatever of the homework that interested me, and ignore the rest. Drove my parents and teachers absolutely insane. I barely got a B average in English, my senior year of high school, then turned around and got a 6 (out of a possible 7) on my IB exam.
Then I got to college and for the first time, realized that I was only studying what I wanted to, and started caring.
I mainly got As in stuff, except phys ed, home ec. and anything like woodwork or metalwork. I was always surprised to get the As. They didn’t mean that much to me – but my mum was proud. 
My grandma likes to tell a story about how I came home one day (she watched me while my parents were at work) from kindergarten with my first test that didn’t score 100%. It was a 96 and I was crying.
So, yes. Very much so.
Growing up in a typical Asian-American family meant that grades were most definitely important. My teachers had this weird idea that being Asian automatically meant you were supposed to be a genius in math. Ironically, English and social studies have always been my best subjects, and math my worse. My parents, on the other hand, somehow put it into my head that anything less than an A was a cause for deep, deep shame. I remember coming home with a B+ in Science once and being made to feel I would never live it down, that this mark of shame would be visited on my descendants to the 10th generation. Or something along those lines.
Then we moved to Korea, and of course my grades sucked. I got Ds and Fs all over the place. I managed to pull my total average up to a B+ by high school, but by then I realized that feeling abject shame at a B+ was a little out of proportion, to say the least.
No, but yes. I never really cared about my grades, as they are more decorative than anything to me. But, with my idle curiosity, I only took the hardest classes in HS, and typically being the only guy in the room (with the possible exception of the teacher) who cares about learning for the sake of learning, I’ve always naturally done fairly well. I was first my first three years of HS, and now that I am in my last term, I actually am finding myself working slightly more than usual, to maintain my position. (I’ve always been a fan of arbitrary goals.)
I also think grades are necessary, although people may learn more without them. Learning and being intellectual counts little in this world, unless you can market yourself in some way.
Nah. I’ve always been capable of getting an A-/B+ with almost no effort, and I’ve always cared much more about not working than getting good grades.
Some years and some classes I had best friends I’d compete with but when I wasn’t competing with someone I never cared at all. The 3 best friends I did that with always tried to be the best in every class whether or not I was in their class but for whatever reason I was never motivated by anything else besides creaming a beloved friend. I guess my self esteem as a child came more from knowing I made someone I loved feel like second best than from any pure love of bettering myself. I could get a 96 but if my friend got a 96.2 I would think I might as well have had a 50. My best friend from middle school blew me away in math during highschool and I gave up. She wound up having a grade 13 math average over 100% and would bitch about how English wasn’t fair because you couldn’t get 100%. Then again she was also anorexic and nearly died of her perfectionism so I guess I should count myself lucky that I opted out trying to compete with her. Then AGAIN she has an accounting business now and is rich, biotch, so maybe she wins.
You had tests in kindergarten? And you understood the concept of percentage grades at that age?
Interesting.
Now for the second part of my question. I hope it gets noticed as it’s sometimes hard to re-direct the OP when trying to do so on purpose.
I don’t consider myself particularly giften but things do come to me fairly easily when I’m curious about them. I never cared much about marks either and was a B- student without applying myself very much at all. When I did, my marks improved but that didn’t matter much either because it’s the newly acquired knowledge that was the real reward in and of itself.
My kid(s), largely my oldest, is very much like me. It worries me because nearing the end of grade 4, she seems virtually impervious to the fact that she actually needs to study to get her marks up. She’s a C student now. She’s bright and social, well adjusted and creative in writing, art, music and even some topics in math (she likes fractions… go figure!) but can’t or won’t apply herself in social studies, and spelling. She just doesn’t care that in a recent test on the Civil War, she got a D. Same for a recent spelling test.
She simply didn’t study, or when she did, she just spent time superficially looking at the stuff without having it penetrate. The fact that her peers largely did better, didn’t seem to matter.
My encouragements and reasoning with her doesn’t seem to have much of an effect. Not even a couple of meeting with her teacher have made much of an impact on her. She promises to do better but neglects to either bring the work home with her or just doesn’t apply herself to learn it well.
Sometimes it’s like throwing stuff at a teflon wall. Nothing sticks. She just turns of her mind and nothing gets in. She can’t even repeat a fact that we covered two minutes prior. It’s like her brain stepped out of the building.
For what it’s worth, when she applies herself, she does absorb things fairly quickly and she does not have any learning disabilities or behaviour problems. It’s just that she doesn’t understand the importance of learning and either can’t be bothered to muster interested or fear of failing/doing poorely.
So how do I help her overcome these bad study habits and care more about her marks/obligations?
I’m frustrated with her but in some sense I understand her. I never had the fear either. I think I was just more curious and therefore did better.