The Smart Student’s Credo

(adapted from Adam Robinson, What Smart Students Know, 1993)

• Nobody can teach you as well as you can learn to teach yourself.
  
  
• Being a good student means that you are learning, not just doing the work.
  
  
• Not everything you are assigned to read or asked to do is equally important.
  
  
• Grades are opinions.
  
  
• Making mistakes (and occasionally appearing foolish) is the price you pay for real learning and growth.
  
  
• The point of a question is to get you to think — not simply to answer it.
  
  
• You’re in school to learn to think for yourself, not simply to repeat what the teachers or textbooks tell you.
  
  
• You will not find all subjects interesting and fun, but being actively engaged in learning them is better than being passively bored and not learning them.
  
  
• Few things in life are as potentially difficult, frustrating or frightening as genuine learning, yet nothing else can give you so many rewards and so much power.
  
  
• How well you do in school reflects your attitude and your study strategies, not your ability.
  
  
• If you are doing schoolwork just for the grades or for the approval of others, you are missing the satisfactions of real learning and putting your self-esteem at the mercy of things outside your control.
  
  
• School is a game, but it is a very important game!
  
  

SOURCE: http://www.bridges.edu/Pages/story2.html