Student Loans Insight

Learning to Conquer College Coursework

College classes are different than high school classes. High School classes need to teach you some basic math, basic English, basic history, etc. They set the foundation for the classes you will take in college. The grading system is also different, a difference for which you should be adequately prepared when you enter college life.

If you were to get a word picture of education, you might think of it as an ever expanding and growing pyramid. The basics lay the foundation of the pyramid and even though we build a foundation throughout elementary school, the foundation continues to widen and expand because we continue to find out “basic” stuff all our lives. Elementary school gives you very basic knowledge which you are to memorize and repeat back to your teacher in a certain way. In other words, you must understand that 2 plus 2 equals 4 in grade school so that you can move to algebra in high school.

On top of the basics, the foundation, we put what we learn in high school. We are still memorizing and simply repeating what we have learned but we are also expanding what we have in our foundation. Algebra simply will not work if you don’t have the basics of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division down pat when you get into the class. You can’t understand how history works together in high school and how current events are built on history unless you’ve learned the basics of history in elementary school.

College does somewhat the same thing but on a much broader scale. In college, you take everything you’ve learned till now, you listen to the lectures, you memorize, you repeat it back to the professor but you also are asked through various research projects and tests to apply what you have learned and repeated back to the professor to a situation you may have never even heard of before. Your foundation and your world expands. In college coursework, the questions are not so much, “Tell me what you learned,” but “Tell me how what you learned applies to…”

Of course, because there are not so many assignments, there are not so many grades. When there are not as many grades, there is no room in the grades for goofing off. If you only have five assignments in the semester and one of those assignments receives a zero, you will very likely not get an A in the class. College coursework is different than any you have done until now. Be sure to be prepared for the difference.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 26th, 2008 at 5:57 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.