<p>I was talking to someone at work yesterday re males and freshman year. He had three nephews who struggled initally in college and a daughter who sailed right through. I think that it is an issue of maturity and organizational skills. Eventually the men figure it out and move on. My oldest, a freshman, is showing some progress along these lines. My youngest, a hs sophomore, scares me sometime. He is a history/humanities guy, and is enjoying the fact that he starting to hold his own against all of the smart girls (his phrase) in his class. The other day he called me and left messages at several locations (cell phone, work) to pass on a message from my hairdresser that she needed to cancel an appt. When I called to check in on my way home from work, he asked me if I had called them to reschedule. So unboy-like, he'll be fine.</p>
<p>texdad, you are hilarious, you sound like my dad. in answer to your question, my theory is that as high school academics have become more demanding, us guys, in general, are just not buying it. i mean, come on, the amount of time they want us to just SIT ALONE and study is just beyond reasonable. we are hunters and gatherers, for God's sake! what is expected of us in high school to get into a decent college is ridiculous. we don't have enough time to be kids and teenagers. no time for auto tech, woodshop, jobs, let alone, some down time once in a while. the girls on the other hand, don't mind the demands as much...although that can't be all true when you look at the rise in eating disorders, depression, etc.</p>
<p>peter k - now, THERE is a fresh perspective. Food for thought (no pun intended).</p>
<p>good one...haha!</p>
<p>Man, most of these things that are being said about males apply to me. when I was in middle school, I would be organized you you wouldn't believe. I would have a gigantic binder with everything in some type of order with all my classwork, and school supplied neatly placed.</p>
<p>Come high school, I just stopped being organized at all; I just didn't care anymore and was preety depressed for a long time. I had one binder for every class and my math binder would always fall apart from me not bothering to punch holes in my useless busy work that we needed to keep. I was a freshman and could really care less if I got an F that was just going to be worth .1% of my grade and was ignorant on how my grades would be evaluated in college. Nothing anoyed me more in school than to have to do tons of work in class and to be assigned homework that I wasn't even sure the teacher would take in(they took up paper randomly sometimes), so I just stopped doing nearly anything including homework. I passed all my classes almost completely on test grades scoring an average of eighty in busy work classes and A's in classes that counted tests more than anything.</p>
<p>Maybe it's just that I hated doing so much work with no rewards that got me down. Either way, I graduated with a 3.0-3.2 average for my lazyness. Now I'm starting to do better in college because I know that everything is going to be counted. I'm now getting past the lazyness that I had in high school after 2 semesters of taking just 9-10 hour worth of classes. I'm planning to take a minimum of 12 hours in the summer and at least 15-16 in the next fall semester.</p>
<p>you sound very normal to me. you were smart to just take it in stride, and not push yourself to the point of mental and physical exhaustion. this is what the college system doesn't understand...they need to back off, and let us be high school kids while we aren't in high school. then when we get to college we will not feel like we have missed out on our lives already!</p>
<p>There's nothing wrong with pushing ourselves; it's nothing about missing out on my life either(I could of gotten good grades and still have a good life). It's just that some people take longer to find the motivation they once had, and are unwilling to work and kiss teachers asses for little or no rewards.</p>
<p>Haha, I've read some of the thread and I can relate to some of those people that write like an epileptic monkey(doctors handwriting). Not only does it look bad, but I don't write everything the conventional way. I write fives, b's, and a whole lot of letters and numbers from bottom to top for some reason( I have no idea how that's weird). I also write without lifting my pen up leaving many letters connected with a fine line. I don't know, maybe it's just impatience.</p>
<p>It sounds to me like I'd get along with all your sons. I'm always the one who loses papers, has illegible writing, hates homework quizzes, never takes notes, etc. My handwriting is atrocious- I've been pulled aside by countless teachers and asked to PLEASE write so they can read it. I really do try- I just go too fast and my letters run together. My handwriting looks much the same way it did in kindergarten, only it's much much smaller. I've taken to typing my homework lately, so when I lose the first copy, I can just print another. I keep stacks of papers on my bedroom floor. Behind the bed, I have a laundry basket full of other paper. That said, my room is clean- it's just covered in paper.</p>
<p>It's not just the boys :).</p>
<p>The top 10 students in my class is a group that consists of 8 girls and 2 guys, myself being #9 and the other #3. However, I feel, and I think some others may agree, that we are the most intelligent out of them all. How can this be? Because we are two of the laziests SOBs you'll ever meet. Our valedictorian is a girl whose only real goal in school for the past 5 years has been to become the valedictorian. She would always do all of her work. She would study for test she could have aced anyway. But what I really always hated about her was her complete obsession with grades. I personally try as hard as I can to not care about grades. My goal in school is to receive however much of the little education that is offered to me that I can. If I am handed an assignment, and I see that it has little or no real educational value, which happens way too often, I either don't do it or I do it to the very worst of my abilities. </p>
<p>My PreCalc teacher last year is one of the only teachers that I have had that really understands the purpose of homework. He would assign homework almost every night, but he never checked it. The homework was only there for the students that needed the extra work to understand the material. For me, I usually understood the material within the first 5 minutes of class, so I was never bothered by doing busywork. But when he saw people that were failing his tests and not doing their homework, that is when he got upset. </p>
<p>Anyway, I believe I should get to some sort of point here. When you deal with the most intelligent portion of a high school, it seems to me, from my little experience, that there is no clear evidence that either guys or girls are superior, even if I have my own beliefs. Instead, girls are just more willing to do a lot of work for the reward of receiving a good grade. Boys, or at least me and #3, are more likely to try to sort through the BS work and only do that which they deem important. Which is the better system? As with most things, it's probably a mix between the two of them.</p>