Because I write this blog mainly for my students, I feel like I can give you some teacher's advice. Here are three things that would have revolutionized the lives of many of my students (about a third of them).
Show Up! The previous blog entry said something about attendance. I'll say it again. Unless you're in college as a sort of expenses-paid vacation, you need to pass courses and learn information. You can't do that if you're not in class. My students with poor attendance records are always surprised when they turn in papers that I don't approve of. They thought they had guessed right on the assignment! Why not actually show up and make sure? The student with tapering attendance is always fascinating. Pretty good at the start, then less and less. What? Did you learn it all in the first month? Did you discover alcohol? Or are you just so arrogant that you figure nobody can teach you anything?
Read the Assignment! I mean this in two senses:
1. Read the stuff in the book. I don't know about you, but when I spend $90 for something, I want to get some good out of it. And no, the teachers don't get a cut of the profits. And no, we don't hear whether you did buy the book—so we don't grade on spending. We do grade on whether you absorbed the stuff inside the book. And surprisingly enough (this may be different from high school books) there's actually something inside most college textbooks that's worth reading!
2. Read the directions for the thing you're supposed to be writing. When I ask my students for a research paper that's five to seven pages long, I'm not going to give full credit for two pages of unsupported opinion.
Make a Gradebook! You need to know how many absences you have in a class, particularly if you have trouble showing up. You need to know what your grades are, so you know how much it will hurt you when you don't choose to turn in a major assignment. Many of my disappointed students this semester had no idea they were in trouble, even though they might have missed a quarter of our class meetings and not bothered to turn in a major paper. Here's a little hint: few college instructors will seek you out and try to talk you into doing the work. We feel we have better things to do.
