Tuesday, March 29, 2011

effort

I'm trying to get back into the blogging groove so I'll try to make one blog entry a week (minimum) !!

If I could create an ideal world, I would enforce equity throughout.the world, in terms of education. Yes, I'm a firm supporter of meritocracy, I believe effort is what should count, not how many As you manage to get. That will be my mantra for my kids anyway. Do your best, put in your best effort, and noone can fault you.

(Just to loosely define some things in case people don't understand, meritocracy = getting rewards based on your effort, and equity = things are distributed fairly according to what you deserve.  In this case, good results)

So anyway, one of my pet peeves, on top of bad breath and smelly ______s, is people who get good(or better) results but work less than me.

My work ethic is as such - work first, play later. I finish what I have to do, then I'll slack and play whatever. I like to draw up study schedules so that I can plan my work accordingly and finish them ahead of time. I HATE doing last minute work it's just so ... frustrating and stressful.

As such, I'm often finishing my readings and supposed 'studying' way ahead of time, as compared to people around me. I don't know what is it about the culture around me but uni people seem to like to do things last minute, including readings. I know people who study like 3-4 chapters in the last 3-4 days before a test (whereas I typically cover 3-4 chapters over 3-4 weeks)

And the worse part of all? They do better than me.

Like what's the point of my working so hard? What's the point of doing readings on time and still not doing much better than them? (or even just slightly better)

It really gets on my nerves when I know of people who study like just the day before, and when results come out, they COMPLAIN that their results aren't good enough. 'Why didn't i score higher? oh noes. I put in so much effort you know!'

WTF? Effort? Last minute study is effort? I guess staying up late till 3AM (or later) the night before an exam quantifies as significant effort for these people.

What about me? I end up scoring lower, or at most 1-2 marks more than them, when I studied waaay in advance.

What's the point of studying so hard like that? Why can't my memory be as awesome and I can also cram just the day before the exam and score as well as them? Why do I have to read waay in advance and revise several times before I can truly encode everything? Zzz.


And a side topic, ok nevermind I shall write that side topic on realFASS blog. thanks for reading this rant if you really did. bye.