Tuesday, November 29, 2016

What Does It Mean To Be A Good Student

Since several of your posts on personal reputations were about your being good student, I did a search on that and eventually found the essay linked below, which I thought wasn't bad.  It is from 1997, ancient history for you, just yesterday for me.  One wonders how much of it has changed since.
The piece does say that you can grow ability.  (The psychologist Carol Dweck in here book Mindset says you can grow intelligence.)  In either case, translating that into the jargon of our course, that would be increasing general human capital.  Here, the labelling matters not.  What does matter is that practice of the right sort can improve things.

The one issue I have with this is on the matter of hard work.  We may have talked about this in class earlier in the semester.  If you are absorbed in something and it has your full attention, you may learn a lot from the experience, but it might be quite enjoyable so I wouldn't describe that as hard work.  I am told that people have different innate ability to concentrate.  If that is true, for those with that ability the learning isn't hard work.  For those who find concentrating difficult, it is more of a struggle.

If you do read this I wonder if it coincides with your view of what being a good student means.

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