Introduction | What's the point of this newsletter?

Okay. First off, I want to address the title of this newsletter.

Why is it called, ‘How to NOT suck at school’ (honestly sounds kinda offensive, right?) instead of something like Practical Success Tips for College, or Innovative Test Taking Strategies for Academic Success, or even How to Improve your Grades in School?

First off, those titles would be pretty boring. But, there is actually a bigger reason I chose that name. Let me explain. How many of you have ever heard someone say the phrase: I suck at school or I suck at chemistry or I suck at math? My guess is that many of you have even said something like that yourself at some point or another. Saying this seems innocent, but it actually is a bigger deal than you might think.

For some reason, we tend to connect our identity with our ability to play the game we call ‘school.’ Unfortunately, too many of us think we either “have it or we don’t” when it comes to school, and this type of thinking has led many people to swear off formal education altogether. Worse still, is that many people spend their entire lives believing that they are somehow less intelligent than others because they didn’t do very well in school. The thing is, this is (at least partly) the fault of a guy that you have never heard of.

Oddly enough, the classification of students as ‘academically gifted’ or ‘not-so-gifted’ has its roots in early-American history. Now, I know what you are thinking. Before you check out at the mention of the word HISTORY, don’t leave, you’ll want to read this.

In 1905, the Paris school system commissioned a man named Alfred Binet, to develop a way to identify mentally challenged children.¹ He partnered with another scientist and created the Binet-Simon test. You guessed it. The other guy’s name was Simon. This test was meant to identify students’ mental abilities so that teachers could offer extra help to those who needed it — oddly enough this test also serves as the basis for the modern IQ test.²

Simon and Binet were adamant that the test was simply meant to identify students who could be helped, not to classify people according to intelligence. When this test arrived in America, however, it was used for a slightly different purpose. Henry Goddard, the man who brought this test to the United States believed differently from these guys. He thought that “each human being has a potentiality for a definite amount of intelligence … and beyond that all efforts at education are useless.” In sum, he thought that intelligence was a fixed attribute of a person — like height or eye color.

Essentially, this led Goddard to create a hierarchy of mental ability (kinda like a food pyramid, but about people) that ranked people according to their intelligence levels. In this ranking system, the idiot was at the bottom, the imbecile was next, and the morons were right below normally intelligent people. I wonder which category Goddard considered himself to be in? Regardless, he was firm in his assertion that these classifications were fixed, and that a person could not do anything to improve their mental ability.

Sadly, this way of thinking fit in well with the prevalent thinking of the time. Genetics has recently been discovered and American thinkers were very excited at the idea that ‘genes’ could predict certain aspects of a person’s behavior and characteristics. One man, Dr. Albert Priddy, saw the answer to ‘feeblemindedness’ not as helping the individual, but in improving the gene pool through something called eugenics — or the forced sterilization of people whose genes were deemed ‘unfit’ to be passed to future generations (generally those who were considered to be mentally unable). This movement eventually led to a Supreme Court decision in 1927 that legally allowed for forced sterilization in the United States.³

Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, the sterilization movement gained traction in the United States and eventually in Europe — eventually being adopted by Nazi Germany in 1933 (the Germans even quoted the United States 1927 Supreme Court ruling in the Nuremberg trials).⁴ In sum, Nazi Germany was not the first country to categorize a group of people and then attempt to eliminate them from the gene pool.

Anyways, I apologize for this very long — and somewhat dark — way of saying that our culture has a deep history of categorizing us into groups based on our mental ability. It’s hard to believe that this way of thinking simply vanishes without leaving traces in our culture.

Modern reading comprehension tests, standardized testing, and even exams carry remnants of the American obsession with classifying people based on their mental abilities. They work though, don’t they? How many people swear off reading books because of self-inflicted labels that ‘they aren’t good at reading.’ The same thing happens with other subjects such as math or science.

The good news is that Henry Goddard wasn’t right. We are each masters of learning. Think about it — you learned an entire language without textbooks just by hearing other people talk. We don’t need to keep believing that we aren’t good at something that is innate within each of us. So, while I hope that this newsletter helps you achieve the outward results you are looking for in school, it is more important to me that you can learn a new way of thinking when it comes to your education.

In short: This newsletter is not about getting better at taking tests or learning ‘hacks’ that can help you remember concepts better — it’s about making a fundamental paradigm shift in how you look at school and academics. You don’t ‘suck at school.’ That statement is based on a wrong way of thinking that assumes that a person’s mental ability is fixed and cannot be changed, and that mindset probably originates from some guy who lived at a time before bras were invented — sounds pretty dumb when you put this that way doesn’t it? ⁵

Current science has actually shown that our brains are remarkably good at changing and molding themselves to grow and improve. The term scientists use is neuroplasticity. Your brain is a remarkable living organ and is capable of doing amazing things. Ironically, I wonder whether academic success has more to do with ‘unlearning’ old ways of thinking than it does with ‘learning’ new facts and concepts.

In this newsletter, we will explore ideas such as:

• Neuroplasticity & how understanding your brain can help you learn.

• Different types of memory and how to use them strategically.

• Foods you can eat that will help you learn better.

• How to change your relationship with test anxiety.

• Plus many more…

Whether you are about to graduate, have kids who are in school, or are starting college yourself this year — I invite you to subscribe now to join me on a journey that I hope will help you transform the way you look at learning. As a nice side-effect, I believe you will be able to achieve better grades, get higher test scores, and improve your academic opportunities in college.

I look forward to seeing you in the next article.

A little bit about me:

I grew up in Idaho, USA. In High School, I got reasonably good grades, but I struggled with anxiety which made it difficult for me to focus completely when studying and especially during tests. After I graduated High School, I traveled to Mexico to serve a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints where I lived for twenty-five months & learned to speak Spanish.

When I returned from my mission and began college, I was very nervous. Family members suggested that I take easy classes so I could get A’s and get a scholarship to help me pay for the rest of my education. I ended up not taking their advice and enrolling in a difficult Biology 130 course — this felt like a big risk because if I did poorly I would forfeit my chances at a scholarship. The pressure I felt forced me to think differently about how I would approach my academics. I came up with some unique strategies and — to my absolute surprise — I didn’t miss a single question on the first test and scored over 100%. Throughout the rest of college, I continued to develop my approach to learning and ended up setting the curve on numerous exams, classes, and assignments. I graduated with a 4.0 GPA with two majors and two minors and was the Valedictorian of my entire class.

As a Freshman, if someone would have told me that I would one-day graduate at the top of my class, I would have thought they were absolutely crazy. I had always enjoyed learning, but I definitely did not consider myself to be an ‘academic person.’ The point is, I feel quite confident that my success in college comes at least as much from my willingness to think differently about learning as it does from simply some notion of being naturally talented at it.

I think that any of us can improve our ability to learn if we are willing to challenge the old ways of thinking that have held us back. I truly believe that each of us has an incredible potential for learning. By unlearning the limits that we have placed on ourselves, and educating ourselves about the way we learn, we each can learn to not only excel at school but to enjoy it as well.

By taking pressure off ourselves, and disconnecting the results from our sense of identity and worth, we can learn — wait for it — how to NOT suck at school.

I am here to help guide you along that journey.

Citations:

1. Cohen, A. (2017). Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American eugenics, and the sterilization of Carrie Buck. Penguin Press.

2. Reilly, P. R. (2015). Eugenics and involuntary sterilization: 1907–2015. Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics, 16(1), 351–368. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-genom-090314-024930

3. Dombrowski, S. C. (n.d.). The dark history of IQ tests. TED. https://ed.ted.com/lessons/the-dark-history-of-iq-tests-stefan-c-dombrowski

4. Buck v. Bell. (n.d.). Oyez. Retrieved June 14, 2023, from https://www.oyez.org/cases/1900-1940/274us200

5. Pandika, M. (2014, August 5). Bra history: How a war shortage reshaped modern shapewear. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2014/08/05/337860700/bra-history-how-a-war-shortage-reshaped-modern-shapewear

6. Cherry, K. (2022, November 8). What is Neuroplasticity? Verywell Mind. https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-brain-plasticity-2794886