As a student, it is difficult to assess whether you are on the right track of what you are trying to accomplish, but throughout high school, I have learned many things about myself and developed several habits that helped me be successful. I have found that the best habits for me are having a growth mindset, mentor or a coach, and the desire to deliberately practice. I also learned that my writing processes are not the best and could be better with the strategies of experienced writers.
In a TED talk by Carol Dweck, a Psychology Professor from Stanford University, she described a growth mindset as a view of seeking ways for improvement and revising yourself as a response to hardship. In other words, having a growth mindset means to be able to be open to suggestions and to learn from your mistakes. As a student, I believe that having a growth mindset will be useful for me.
In my first year of high school, I joined the swim team and had dreams to one day be able to swim for varsity. During one practice my coach told me that he believed I can get there if I came to practice everyday and worked hard for it. Instead of giving up and accepting the fact that I was stuck in junior varsity, this opened the doors for me to realize that I had the potential to swim for varsity if I worked hard for it. I trained everyday and soon saw that my times were improving and getting close to the varsity times. The following year, I swam in varsity and earned three medals in the All City competition. Having a growth mindset worked for me to achieve my goal of swimming in varsity because I realized that I could be just as fast as them if I worked hard for it. If I did not have a growth mindset, I would have believed that my times were fixed and could not improve. However, I opened my mind and said that I can do it as long as I trained hard for it.
This semester, I am currently taking a pre-calculus class and I want to try to have a growth mindset throughout the semester because I am not good at math in general. In fact, I had a fixed mindset in my last math class I enrolled in which lead me to giving up and failing because I decided that I was not able to learn the topic. However, I hope that will not be the case for this class because I need to pass and graduate.
Another habit that has been most effective for me is deliberately practicing with a coach. When I set a goal that I am struggling to accomplish, I am the type of person to ask, “What am I doing wrong and how can I fix it?”. In the article, The Making of an Expert, a Psychology Professor from the University of Florida named K. Anders Ericsson defined deliberate practice as, “practice that focuses on tasks beyond your current level of competence and comfort.” In other words, deliberate practice is the action of frequently practicing on something that you are not the most comfortable with. He also mentions that a component that deliberate practice requires is having a coach or a mentor to help you get to what you want to achieve.
During swim team in high school, I struggled in swimming the stroke, butterfly. Butterfly involves the movement of simultaneously swinging your arms from your chest to above the water accompanied by the dolphin kick. While swimming, I would purposely avoid swimming butterfly because I was not that great at it and it was not fun. However, my coach told me that my butterfly stroke needed a lot of work so I had to practice butterfly everyday. Each day, he would correct my stroke bit by bit of what I was doing wrong. Although his criticisms were sometimes harsh, I learned how to accept his comments because I knew that pointing out my mistakes would help me perfect my stroke. Eventually I got to the point where my coach said that my stroke looked better. Knowing that I worked well with a mentor, I plan on finding a friend to tutor me so that I can get better at math for my pre-calculus class.
Throughout my years in school, my writing has gotten better year after year. However, I still have some bad habits that linger with me today. With that being said, I learned about the strategies of how experienced writers write in comparison to how student writers write. The experienced writer strategy that I found most useful for my learning was that experienced writers add, delete, or reorder their sentences in their writing. Many inexperienced student writers often write only one draft and do not bother revising their work. Nancy Sommers, the Director of Expository Writing at Harvard Graduate School of Education, conducted a study to compare how student writers revise their work in comparison to what an experienced writer would do. From this study, I learned that the majority of students only change a few words to make their writing sound more intelligent but they do not stop to think and question about the meaning of their work. I also learned that experienced writers revise their work as they go and that they think about their reader which influences their revision process.
In many of my writings for English class, I tend to substitute words by using the thesaurus to find words that would sound smarter if I used it. However, I did not actually know what the word meant and it often changed the meaning of the message I was trying to convey. Instead of just looking for “better” words from the thesaurus, I should instead question my writing and determine what the meaning of my writing is like experienced writers do. I should also consider adding, deleting, or reordering my sentences so that my writing can be clearer to a reader.
I have found many habits that have helped me become successful throughout my years in school. I talked about how having a growth mindset helped me achieve my goal in swimming for varsity. I also talked about how having a mentor or a coach was useful for me in perfecting my skills while deliberately practicing. Lastly, as a student, I learned that experienced writers have different habits such as writing multiple drafts which I plan to do now as a college student.
