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Comment by emptytheory | Hacker News Reader

I'm one of those people who failed as an undergraduate. You know what's not pleasant? Being under constant stress to perform and "progress". Maybe, just maybe, that has something to do with learning in school. By the way, that's entirely a product of the academic system.

"The opposite is true: a good course is one where you always feel that you will barely make it."

Because making people stress necessarily means they're learning more? How do we know that? My experience suggests the opposite.

"It might not be a pleasant course, but it is one where you are learning. It is by struggling that we learn."

Yes: struggling with the material.

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I guess the author agrees with me in another one of his articles (so maybe I just misinterpreted):

"There is no trace of evidence that you can get the best out of people at high-level tasks through pressure and competition. The opposite is true. Worried people get dumber. They may be faster at carrying rocks… but they do not get smarter.

Stressing out academics, students, engineers or any modern-day worker… makes them less effective. If we had any sense, we would minimize competition to optimize our performance."

http://lemire.me/blog/archives/2014/12/05/academia-as-an-anx...

Upvoted this. I have many students who face the challenge of mathematics with relish and they learn a lot by struggling. I have others who look at math, think "I'm not the kind of person who does/can do this" (for a variety of reasons), and fade out. Struggling with the material only happens if you are relaxed enough, in some sense, to engage with the material. A good part of my job with some populations was persuading them that they could fruitfully struggle with the material. The fear of mathematics is surprisingly pervasive in the US, as is the fear of struggle and the fear of not "performing".

"Drive" by Dan Pink sort of talks about that. Your purpose should be something that you provide, not external factors, like grades and fears from what comes from them.

It's entirely possible to be internally driven and to still not function well in a school. (Unless you think the only purpose students should pursue is "succeeding in school".)

I think my story is a decent anecdote to support your statement. I spent half of college on academic probation with the main contribution to my terrible GPA being default failing status from skipping too much class.

I dropped out of school, got a job that was supposed to teach me something. It turned into answering the phone, but I used that time and title to land a Jr. software dev position and within just a few months I was being assigned solo projects and completing them ahead of schedule because I actually enjoyed learning the material outside of a structured environment.

I'm not a genius. I'd bet I'm not even that special. I think many people are just too conditioned to follow the wide beaten path, that even when they see a more appealing path they are scared to take it, and no one is actually encouraging them to take that path.

I'm in the same boat. I struggled through college because I had to in order to keep my parents' health insurance (!), but my heart wasn't in it. Eventually I learned to do the minimum and coast through, but I had other things going on in my life that were so much more interesting and I just couldn't muster the motivation to "study".

Enter the real world, and guess what? Critical thinking skills and a tenacity to solve real problems are in tremendously short supply. You've got high-GPA graduates galore who can't tie their own bloody shoes. Motivation is everything.

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