I hate it when I hear super nerdy geeks complaining about grades in the 90s. Don’t get me wrong, the best students are super nerdy geeks, but as a lifelong card-carrying member of that hard luck tribe, even I was satisfied with any academic assessment if the first digit was a nine. I was also never one to whine about a minus following a letter grade, so long as that letter were formed by line segments only (self-denigrating laughing emoji here).
But seriously, with all the experience and best-intentions to help students have the best chance of acceptance to top colleges, I tell students who ask how to improve on a 92 in this or that to go find a kid or kids who can’t break into the 80s and help them. Know why? Because as a career educator, I’ve discovered over and over that one of the very best ways to learn material is to teach it.
Like most valuable lessons, I learned this one in the school of hard knocks. The name of this particular school was (and still is) Maimonides, where no-nonsense students came from from no-nonsense families with no-nonsense standards for education. It was my first year of teaching, a notoriously busy year as far as careers go, and I was grateful for the one weekly grammar class as required by an inherited course curriculum: grammar had always come easily to me (thanks mom and dad and excellent grammar teachers of my own), so I figured I could take one night off from formal “preps” and just wing it. Oops.
Everything was going just swell until we got to prepositions, that pesky part of speech everyone can recognize but no one can define. Including the teacher. Fortunately, I was saved by a Warriner’s English Grammar book, which were more prevalent than spiders in that building, so you were never actually more than six feet from one.*
Anyway, my point is this: having to teach grammar sharpened my knowledge of it and my ability to articulate that knowledge. Likewise, if you’re getting a low A in an Algebra class, one way to bump it up to a solid A is to find one or more students struggling with more basic math and help them. By reinforcing and clarifying fundamental material in the same subject, you develop your own A game (without the minus ;-)).
And on a personal note, I would generalize this academic strategy to the game of life, where helping others is very often the fastest route to helping yourself.
P.S. If you happen to be struggling in any class or getting grades where the first digit isn’t a nine or a letter not formed by line segments, we’re here to help: https://CollegePrepExpresss.com
*Preposition: a word that relates its object to another word in the sentence. Does that help? Didn’t think so ;-).