Born with a Head Start

Toward the start of the semester, I wrote a blog post about my frustration within my new IB schedule. In that post, I was going to talk about how the hard-work that one put in doesn't correlate with their result. The result of the hard-work would only be an improvement compared with the lack thereof. Within the academic structure, it is a very unfair and unjustified situation when the student that works hard gets a lower grade than the one being lazy. There seems to be a genetic difference between people that determines their "intelligence". But this is not true, the people that seem to be smarter and putting in less effort are only that way because they had worked hard when they are young. Their parents have guided them through more practice and left them with more experiences when it comes to school. In contrast, the students who need to work marginally harder is that way because they had never been taught the right way of facing a problem. Gifted individuals are born with a head start due to their unconscious effort made when they are young.

The difference in the time for different people to understand a concept varies extensively, and it stays true even when they are being taught the same way. It explains why some people need hours upon hours of extra-dedicated tutoring while others understand at the instant the teacher explains. The way that some people already have the training of interpreting new information saves them from the need for previewing or even reviewing. While these "gifted" people procrastinate or invest their free time, the unfortunate need to work an extra mile to get to the same place. These late-starters require double, triple, or quadruple the time to catch up with the "gifted" people. This all is evident in my process of teaching a multitude of people coding. Some of the people that I taught are in the highest coding class offered in school, while the others are coding for their first time. These two types of people understand new concepts in two very different speed. While the ones who learnt coding for three years could recreate my examples in one attempt, the ones new to coding need my step-by-step commentary of what their thought-processes need to be. This two type of people is meshed by the people in the middle: the ones who have developed a coding (step-by-step) mindset from past experiences. Although all of these people work and think with the same degree of concentration, the time that takes them to understand and reproduce a skill demonstrated range according to their past experiences. Their lack of past experiences suffocate them from the ability to understand, and they have to work harder to do the same thing as others.

In the IB classroom, the effort that each student varies a lot, but the grades of each individual are not that different. The lowest grade for a person would be a B(me :( , lol), not really even a B-. This difference in the effort put into schoolwork inversely correlate how much extra-curricular activity that person has. The ones that treat IB as a walk in the park are part of the "international"(?) debate team, asb, part of nation-wide internships and more that I feel like its there (I don't stalk people). The things that I mention that the "intelligent" is part of comes in combinations, and it shocks me as because any one of them would completely use all my time. These people could handle the IB classes with ease and continue with their desire to achieve more. In the contrary, there are the ones that dedicate all their time to only IB. These people while getting similar or even worse grades that the ones with their hands full work all day to review and catch up (I speak of this from my experience and my intuition on what I think about other's situation, not really that convincing, but bare with me, or not).  This difference comes from the past experience one have in school. For me, I had always been in standard level classes all my life. From the start of grade 7, I had accustomed to myself to the work-load of these comparatively easy classes(I didn't have a choice, really), and I always had a slow and inefficient way of understanding course materials. In response to the unplanned but weekly tests, it takes me upwards of 4 hours to review for a chapter. While others are going through flashcards, I am going through a process of making notes digitally, hand-writing them, covering them and reciting it at the end (flashcards for me would result in an F, maybe a bit exaggerated, but you get what I mean). Although work had been put in for all of the students, the time it takes for one to prepare differs a lot from another.

While the work put in by different people differs, people who have started learning earlier enjoys the benefit of getting good results despite the lack of work. The people without a head-start needs to work harder. And despite being negative about having and not having a head start, this phenomenon tells us that what Albert Einstein said about hard-work is true: "Genius is 1% talent and 99% percent hard work..." And for the ones who have disadvantages, it only comes more true that anyone could make up their lack of hard work just by starting to be diligent. As a famous Chinese saying puts it: "If you don't proceed, you are retracting"

My attempt at making an acapella... lol. I know its a bit - very off. 

I will just scrap and redo the whole thing again.

but either way, I wanted to share it on somewhere that no one will notice

An Art I did for Inktober: wasn't the best ever, but I was bulk doing 6 of these in an hour, lol
plus it is for the blog thumbnail