Why Students Struggle

The Straight A Conspiracy: Why Students Struggle

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A vast majority of students find school challenging due to a wide variety of reasons, ranging from poor organizational skills to negative attitudes towards certain subjects. As a result, some students find school difficult, stressful, and end up failing to learn key concepts that are essential to their intellectual growth. However, research presented by Maats and O'Brien reveals that students unknowingly tend to make some actions that contribute to their struggles. Some actions students unknowingly make in school that cause them to fail include multitasking, managing their time poorly, and accepting logical and emotional fallacies.

Multitasking contributes to the struggles that most students face immensely. In recent years, technological advancements in the form of smartphones, tablets, and PCs have made it more difficult for students to focus on their schoolwork. Most students today complete their schoolwork while simultaneously using their devices to keep in touch with friends, listen to music, or even watch videos. However, multitasking overloads the brain by asking it to do something that it is not equipped to do (Maats and O'Brien 56). Attempting to concentrate on too multiple tasks at once leads to information overload, and can actually cause one to make mistakes. Multitasking also inhibits an individual's creative ability since devoting one's attention to too many tasks does not leave sufficient memory to come up with innovative concepts. Essentially, this means that multitasking could complicate an otherwise easy task that may actually require redoing in the end. A study by Mark, Gudith and Klocke found that while it may be possible to complete work in less time yet efficiently through multitasking, this comes at a price: an individual experiences more stress, higher frustration, time pressure and effort (107). Therefore, students who want to succeed are more likely to achieve their long- term goals if they focus on one task at a time.

Completing schoolwork hastily in order to save time is another reason why some students struggle. For instance, a student that is poor in mathematics may have a difficult time moving from Bs and Cs to As because they cannot determine the source of their errors since they avoid showing their work to save time. Ultimately, this leads to disorganized work, which may be difficult or impossible to correct without redoing all of it. Maats and O'Brien suggest creating a checklist, which can help one to adopt a more methodical and analytical approach (241). This approach can also be beneficial to a student by assisting them to organize their time well to ensure that important tasks are accomplished. Undoubtedly, a student's greatest asset is time, yet it is irretrievable; thus, by allocating sufficient time to important tasks, students can utilize their time productively and avoid the need to complete schoolwork hastily to beat deadlines.

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Remarkably, students tend to accept logical and emotional fallacies, which prevent them from fully engaging in the learning process. For instance, a student may doubt his or her mathematical aptitude after seeing another student excel while they fail. In reality, the other student may have simply practiced for a longer period and grasped the concepts better and more effectively. According to Maats and O'Brien, "just in the last thirty years, research has demonstrated that an extreme amount of a very specific kind of practice is all it takes to make ordinary people into geniuses (36)." When students doubt their ability to succeed in school, they may end up with low self- confidence because of fear of failure. Essentially, a student that is intimidated by the fear of failure is unlikely to perform well in the long- term, which could further lead to social withdrawal and refusal to accept assistance from teachers and peers. Once this happens, students tend to accept that they are incapable of getting straight- As, in spite of their inherent intellectual capacity to do well in school.

In conclusion, some of the actions that students unknowingly make in school include multitasking, managing their time poorly, and accepting logical and emotional fallacies. Multitasking results in information overload by forcing the brain to do more work than it is equipped to, which ultimately leads to errors, stress, frustration, and anxiety. Similarly, poor time management leads to lower grades, since the student does not have ample time to grasp learning material, or trace the source of their mistakes. Finally, majority of students struggle simply because they have accepted logical and emotional fallacies that make them doubt their inherent capabilities.

Works Cited

Maats, H., O'Brien, K., Gary, L., Goulet, A., & Stanberry, T. (2012). The straight-A conspiracy: Your secret guide to ending the stress of school and totally ruling the world. 368 Press.

Mark, Gloria, Daniela Gudith, and Ulrich Klocke. "The cost of interrupted work: more speed and stress." Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. vol.1, no.1, 2008, pp.107-110.