The End of Average: How We Succeed in a World That Values Sameness by Todd Rose

Author:Todd Rose
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2016-01-18T14:00:00+00:00

TAKING THE UNCHARTED ROAD TO SUCCESS

When, several years after I flunked out of high school, I finally began college at Weber State, I got plenty of advice about the normal pathway for college success. Before my first day of classes, I sat down with my academic adviser—assigned to me because he handled those students whose last names started with the letters between Q and Z—so he could review what courses I should take each semester. I took out my pad and pencil and eagerly began writing down everything he said, thinking to myself, He knows the system here and his job is to figure out what’s best for me. He looked over my high school record, thumbed his beard, and declared, “Given your history of poor academic performance, it makes the most sense if you take all your courses in the usual order. Since you need to pass the remedial math class, take it right now to get it out of the way, and make sure to take the freshman English class during your first semester.”

I was grateful for what I presumed was highly personalized advice. A few hours later, I bumped into another freshman who shared the same adviser. Her background was quite different from mine—she was a well-mannered student from a major high school in Salt Lake City who graduated with an A average. We compared notes . . . and I discovered that my adviser had given her the same recommendations he had given to me—minus the remedial math, of course.

After I got over a surge of annoyance, I thought about my situation more carefully. The normal pathway had not worked out for me in high school, so why in the world should I expect it to work for me in college? I did not blame my adviser—it couldn’t be easy to dole out customized advice to hundreds of confused freshman over a period of a few days—but I did make a conscious decision to never blindly accept what he or anyone else told me was the proper educational path to follow. Instead, I would forge my own path based on whatever I knew about my strengths and weaknesses.

First up: remedial math class. Should I take it? No way. Remedial math has one of the highest fail rates in colleges across the country.61 I knew if I sat in a long, boring math class, I would almost certainly fail, too. I researched alternatives and found out I could skip remedial math if I passed a onetime math test called the CLEP.62 I knew I could study really hard for the test at my own pace and in my own way, and so for a whole year in my spare time I practiced the specific concepts that would be on the test and ended up doing so well on the CLEP test that I was able to skip every math class up to statistics—which turned out to be one of my favorite classes in college. I even became a teaching assistant for a statistics professor.

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