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How To Get Straight A’s in College

Wednesday, March 27th, 2013

This isn’t a joke and I can help if you seriously want to get straight A’s. But here’s the deal. If you decide not to follow my advice, and you don’t get straight A’s you will not whine or complain. You will admit to yourself and others that you chose the grades you got. Deal?

Most people think that the smarter people get the better grades. Not true. The disciplined people get the better grades. They are smarter planners and better at executing a plan persistently and patiently.

Sure you will find people who appear to be exceptions to what I am describing. They will get no sleep, party in excess and pull down good grades. What you may not know is that eventually they will implode. You cannot be distracted by their behavior or apparent success. This has nothing to do with you.

Also you cannot get sucked into the plight of the academically needy. You did not come to college to babysit. If you are going to help others, become a tutor, set your hours and get paid for it. If you don’t get straight A’s because you denied your own studies to help others, understand this was your decision and you cannot blame those you helped after the fact. Are we clear?

1. To get straight A’s you must start work on the first day of school. If you slack even in the first week you can easily find yourself in catch up mode and your chances of Straight A’s are now uncertain.

If you have to set up your dorm room or do any other “set up” activities after day one of the semester, you are not a serious student.

2. Your bed time should be no later than 11:00 pm and 10:00 pm is better. By now you should know how much sleep you need to maintain mental clarity (this is usually 7 or 8 hours a night). Socializing and staying up late with the gang will result in poorer academic performance and you might as well save the money and get a job because you aren’t a serious student. Not only do you have to be able to walk away from a party, you have to avoid them during the semester on week nights and most weekends.

3. Schedule in daily excercise of 30 minutes. (Exception to this are athletes on scholarship, but they have to be disciplined not to linger around the gym when workouts are over).

4. Schedule in meals. 30 minutes for breakfast, 30 minutes for lunch and 1 hour for dinner. (I have just given you 2 hours a day to eat and socialize. Your welcome.)

5. If you are a person of faith, and I hope that you are, schedule 30 minutes a day for prayer and other activities to help you grow in this area. Remember that ultimately your education is just one aspect of your overall growth as a human being.

6. Take one day off a week. That’s right, one day a week you will spend enjoying other people, going to church and relaxing. Bed time stays the same, however.

7. You will study every weekend for at least six hours. Around this studying take care of laundry and other chores.

Are you still with me?

Now here’s the golden nugget. This is what you have to do for the rest of your time during a semester, with the exception of time spent working in a part time job.

9. For every lecture hour you will, as soon as possible, rewrite your notes. In other words you will immediately review that particular lecture writing out clearly every aspect discussed. What you are doing is looking for things you do not understand.

10. Everything you discover that you do not understand requires you to contact either the professor or a class tutor for an explanation. This cannot be put off more than 24 hours during the week and if the lecture was on a Friday, you need this meeting no later than the following Monday.

11. Once you have rewritten your notes you begin or continue work on any pending assignments.

The common error in college is that people think they only have to go to class a few hours a day and then do whatever they feel like doing the rest of the time. Just before midterms or finals week they cram using notes they have not looked at often for weeks, if not months. In the few hours just before the test they discover they don’t really understand what the professor said way back when, but now it’s too late.

Remember, the things you learn doing project assignments do not usually show up on tests the way content from lectures and reading assignments will. So don’t jump into projects before you take care of the daily lecture material. Am I making sense to you? By now, even before school starts, I hope you are beginning to see that you don’t really have that much time to get done what needs to be done. This is why your first week is as critical as your last week in a semester.

12. The way you will study for tests will be to review your notes and get a good night’s sleep.

Added bonus: Usually when you start working the way I have described you will find that other interested good students will want to study with you. Cooperation of this nature is very helpful and you will discover that the friends you begin to make share your academic seriousness. In addition you will be known by the professors. It is the very rare student who comes back a few hours after a lecture and knocks on a someone’s door to ask a question. Trust me, these profs will do everything they can to help you because you are showing interest in what they are interested in.

If you follow my advice completely then I am confident you have done everything within your ability to secure A’s and the odds are greatly in your favor. So now that you know what it will take, are you willing to commit?

I hear a question from the back.

Q. What about extracurricular activities?

A. How badly do you want straight A’s? If not that badly, then you will give time you would have used to study to do something else. So how important is this something else if it will cost you good grades? It’s your call.

I first published this to one of my tumblr accounts on August 5, 2012.

Posted in Personal Glimpses | No Comments »

Dental Professionals Have Two Choices

Tuesday, January 1st, 2013

Dental professionals have two choices on how to think about dentistry.

1. The wishful thinking approach. This is where we think about how dentistry should be practiced and mostly lament that it is not so. Depending on how old we are we either believe dentistry’s golden age has passed or that there is no such thing as a golden age and likely never will be. We regret the little dental schools actually teach or taught us. Often this disappointment has more to do with the business-side of dentistry rather than the clinical. If we are numbered among the few who took additional training, whether formal or through continuing education programs of substance, we feel sorry others with less drive, ambition, or insight have lost their way. In general we are sad at the state of care average under-informed patients are receiving in most other dental offices. We are also often sad and frustrated by the poor decisions many of our own patients make electing for minimal care rather than valuing their mouths and themselves more. Finally we generally hate being pushed around by dental insurance yet still often find ourselves having to deal with third-parties either directly or indirectly. We just wish dentistry was less complicated and look forward to a time when we can do more of something else and less of this.

2. The responsibility mindset. We see life as a series of choices, challenges and opportunities. We recognize that it is our decision to practice as dentists, hygienists, dental assistants or office administrators and we can just as easily decide to do something else tomorrow. We understand the limitations of education and recognize that dental schools operate in a real world of problems, limitations and choices just as we do. We see the benefit of collaboration and have stopped apologizing to others whenever we don’t know something. For this reason we like and tend to gravitate toward those who know things we don’t and can do things we have yet to, or choose not to master, so we can concentrate our skills and energies elsewhere. (One caveat to seeking skilled mentors, if we find they are Beavis’ buddy, we move on).

We in the responsible camp resist complacently accepting the idea that our current level of skill and ignorance is good enough. And although we have the intellectual capacity to understand where the wishful thinker crowd is coming from when they articulate their complaints we choose to focus most of our time and energy working in the present on our most immediate personal challenges as well as our most important dreams. Because we have established where we want to go and what we want to do, we don’t waste a lot of time in fruitless discussions about ephemeral fears. We are not strong debaters as a group because we tend to be more action oriented. Also because our dreams are both weighty and fragile we have learned the power of emotionally traveling light. We work at forgiveness because we understand that bitterness gums up our machinery. We believe love to be the most powerful force in the universe. This is why we fight against isolation and instead focus on helping others achieve what they want and growing to be the best they can be. We have lived long enough to understand that life is not just about what we want and where we are going. We tend to see the practice of dentistry as bigger than we are and a great privilege to be involved in at whatever level we can.

If there is a third choice, I don’t know what it is.

Personally I choose #2 but recognize I can easily drift to #1. If I linger there then it becomes my default choice, whether I like it or not, and I believe I deserve (and will be responsible for dealing with) what follows.

Finally, a practical point of order. When you find yourself lamenting your situation and are tempted to express it in the context of choice #1 above, pause and come up with some really good practical questions instead. For example, instead of saying something like, “Most dentists don’t really care about their patients very much, otherwise they would do ….” come up with a question like, “What are some good ways I and others could better care, or show concern for patients?”

My point is that some generalities don’t help because they only reinforce an opinion. How do any of us really know that dentists in general don’t care about something? If we are struggling with a problem, and it may be a burnout symptom that results in uncaring actions and feelings, rather than broad judgmental strokes, good reflective questions may do the most good in helping us all reflect and ultimately improve.

Posted in Blog, Dental Schools, Dental Students, Dentists, The Human Side of Dentistry | 1 Comment »

So What’s the Big Idea?

Thursday, December 20th, 2012

I discovered the memo function on my iPhone and so recorded this on my drive into work this morning. I know it’s a little slow in pace but I was thinking it up as I went along. Sometimes we get so stuck in routine we stop thinking bigger thoughts. Here’s a brief reflection on that issue.

Big Idea

Posted in Blog, Personal Glimpses | 4 Comments »