We live in a culture driven to achieve top grades. Our culture wants us to just good grades even if it means just memorizing the information and not knowing it. However, this shouldn’t be our culture we should strive to have a good work ethic and have good grades. To be a successful student, you have to be willing to not shy away from challenges or failure.
Carol Dweck, in her article “Brainology”, tells the story of how students believe that their intelligence is fixed. Students with a fixed mindset make challenges even harder for them. If the challenge isn’t something they are comfortable with it makes the failure even more demoralizing. They believe that setbacks reflect very poorly on their intelligence and they start to give up. They feel as if they are dumb and they start to not study as much because they feel like they can’t get any better at the subject. On the other hand, students who have a growth mindset believe that their intelligence can grow through education and effort. Carol Dweck found that students who have growth mindsets worry more about learning than just getting good grades in school. She also, found that when they are hit with a setback in school, they would try something different study a different way, or study more the next time around.
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Angela Duckworth in her Ted Talk explained her theory of grit. Grit is the characteristic that allows a student to work hard and maintain focus for a very long time. She explains to us that having long-term goals is a significant predictor of how much success you will have. She saw how students who were willing to work harder came out on top than students who believed they were already really smart. These hard-working students were more likely to move on and become graduates in college and proving hard work beats talent by getting gritty.
Just like Carol Dweck Angela Duckworth tells us that the ability to learn is not fixed and students can change with effort and perseverance.
First, students with a fixed mindset are often passed up by a student who believes that they can grow and change. In Carol Dweck's article, “Brainology” she tells us that students with a fixed mindset give up much easier than someone who has grit and is willing to go the extra mile. Someone with a fixed mindset after failing a test would say that they feel dumb. With this mindset, one will never be able to bounce back and be successful the next time around. The students who believed they could grow said, they would change the way they study or study more the next time around. Carol Dweck and Mueller have two groups of children with problems from an IQ test. They praised the children in one group for their intelligence and praised the other group for their effort. They offered both groups of children a challenging task the children who were praised for their intelligence wanted an easier one, so they wouldn’t make any mistakes. The children who were praised for their efforts wanted the challenge so they could learn from it.
In addition, when I was little my mom used to always tell me that getting straight A’s should always be my goal. But, if I am just cramming for tests, she rather me get B’s and C’s and study a little bit every day and not do as well on the tests. It worked well for me until I got to high school. I started to play sports and I wouldn’t have as much time during the day as I used to have, we also started to get much more homework than before. So, I thought it would be a good idea to start just cramming and it would be much easier. It took me a while to figure out that being lazy was not going to get me good grades. Then once again I started to take really good notes in class and write down all the definitions from the book. Then once I got home I would rewrite all my notes and I would understand what were learning. I started to do much better on tests and I saw my grades starting to get a lot better.
In my opinion, I believe that being gritty and showing lots of effort is what makes successful people. I think that if you have some type of talent you are willing to put effort in and make your talent better. You will eventually become a person who has a strong work ethic and you can be successful.
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