The Best Professors

The best professors.. were no longer high priests, selfishly guarding the doors to the kingdom of knowledge to make themselves look more important. They were fellow students – no, fellow human beings – struggling with the mysteries of the universe, human society, historical development, or whatever. They found affinity with their students in their own ignorance and curiosity, in their love of life and beauty, in their mixture of respect and fear, and in that mix they discovered more similarities than differences between themselves and the people who populated their classes. A sense of awe at the world and the human condition stood at the center of their relationships with those students.

Most important, that humility, that fear, that veneration of the unknown spawned a kind of quiet conviction on the part of the best teachers that they and their students could do great things together.

Ken Bain, What the Best College Teachers Do

14 quotes worth reading about students using AI

Bots like ChatGPT show great promise as a “writing consultant” for students. “It’s not often that students have a chance to sit down with a professor and have long discussions about how to go about this paper, that paper, how to approach research on this topic and that topic. But ChatGPT can do that for them, provided…they know how to use the right ethics, to use it as a tool and not a replacement for their work.” CalMatters 

Don’t rely on AI to know things instead of knowing them yourself. AI can lend a helping hand, but it’s an artificial intelligence that isn’t the same as yours. One scientist described to me how younger colleagues often “cobble together a solution” to a problem by using AI. But if the solution doesn’t work, “they don’t have anywhere to turn because they don’t understand the crux of the problem” that they’re trying to solve. Chronicle of Higher Ed

Janine Holc thinks that students are much too reliant on generative AI, defaulting to it, she wrote, “for even the smallest writing, such as a one sentence response uploaded to a shared document.” As a result, wrote Holc, a professor of political science at Loyola University Maryland, “they have lost confidence in their own writing process. I think the issue of confidence in one’s own voice is something to be addressed as we grapple with this topic.” Chronicle of Higher Ed

It’s a conversation that can be evoked at will. But it’s not different in the content. You still have to evaluate what someone says and whether or not it’s sensible. CalMatters 

Helena Kashleva, an adjunct instructor at Florida SouthWestern State College, spots a sea-change in STEM education, noting that many assignments in introductory courses serve mainly to check students’ understanding. “With the advent of AI, grading such assignments becomes pointless.” Chronicle of Higher Ed 

Given how widely faculty members vary on what kinds of AI are OK for students to use, though, that may be an impossible goal. And of course, even if they find common ground, the technology is evolving so quickly that policies may soon become obsolete. Students are also getting more savvy in their use of these tools. It’s going to be hard for their instructors to keep up. Chronicle of Higher Ed 

In situations when you or your group feel stuck, generative AI can definitely help. The trick is to learn how to prompt it in a way that can help you get unstuck. Sometimes you’ll need to try a few prompts up until you’ll get something you like.  UXdesign.cc

Proponents contend that classroom chatbots could democratize the idea of tutoring by automatically customizing responses to students, allowing them to work on lessons at their own pace. Critics warn that the bots, which are trained on vast databases of texts, can fabricate plausible-sounding misinformation — making them a risky bet for schools. New York Times

Parents are eager to have their children use the generative AI technology in the classroom. Sixty-four percent said they think teachers and schools should allow students to use ChatGPT to do schoolwork, with 28 percent saying that schools should encourage the technology’s use. Ed Week

Student newspaper editors at Middlebury College have called for a reconsideration of the school’s honor code after a survey found two-thirds of students admitted to breaking it—nearly twice as many as before the pandemic. Wall Street Journal 

If you are accused of cheating with AI Google Docs or Microsoft Word could help. Both offer a version history function that can keep track of changes to the file, so you can demonstrate how long you worked on it and that whole chunks didn’t magically appear. Some students simply screen record themselves writing. Washington Post 

There is no bright line between “my intelligence” and “other intelligence,” artificial or otherwise. It’s an academic truism that no idea exists in an intellectual vacuum. We use other people’s ideas whenever we quote or paraphrase. The important thing is how. Chronicle of Higher Ed

Quizlet has announced four new AI features that will help with student learning and managing their classwork, including Magic Notes, Memory Score, Quick Summary, and AI-Enhanced Expert Solutions.  ZDnet 

James Neave, Adzuna’s head of data science, recommends interested job applicants build up their AI skills and stand out from the competition in three key ways: Stay on top of developments, use AI in your own work, and show how you’ve used AI successfully to achieve a specific goal. CNBC

Struggling for Knowledge

According to a 1995 study, a sample of Japanese eighth graders spent 44 percent of their class time inventing, thinking, and actively struggling with underlying concepts. the study’s sample of American students, on the other hand, spend less than one percent of their time in that state.

 “The Japanese want their kids to struggle,” said Jim Stigler, the UCLA professor who oversaw the study and who co-wrote The Teaching Gap with James Hiebert. “Sometimes the (Japanese) teacher will purposely give the wrong answer so the kids can grapple with the theory. American teachers, though, worked like waiters. Whenever there was a struggle, they wanted to move past it, make sure the class kept gliding along. But you don't learn by gliding.”

Daniel Coyle, The Talent Code

30 Great Quotes about AI & Education

ChatGPT is good at grammar and syntax but suffers from formulaic, derivative, or inaccurate content. The tool seems more beneficial for those who already have a lot of experience writing–not those learning how to develop ideas, organize thinking, support propositions with evidence, conduct independent research, and so on. Critical AI

The question isn’t “How will we get around this?” but rather “Is this still worth doing?” The Atlantic

The reasonable conclusion is that there needs to be a split between assignments on which using AI is encouraged and assignments on which using AI can’t possibly help. Chronicle of Higher Ed

If you’re a college student preparing for life in an A.I. world, you need to ask yourself: Which classes will give me the skills that machines will not replicate, making me more distinctly human? New York Times 

The student who is using it because they lack the expertise is exactly the student who is not ready to assess what it’s doing critically. Chronicle of Higher Ed 

It used to be about mastery of content. Now, students need to understand content, but it’s much more about mastery of the interpretation and utilization of the content. Inside Higher Ed

Don’t fixate on how much evidence you have but on how much evidence will persuade your intended audience. ChatGPT distills everything on the internet through its filter and dumps it on the reader; your flawed and beautiful mind, by contrast, makes its mark on your subject by choosing the right evidence, not all the evidence. Chronicle of Higher Ed 

The more effective, and increasingly popular, strategy is to tell the algorithm what your topic is and ask for a central claim, then have it give you an outline to argue this claim. Then rewrite them yourself to make them flow better. Chronicle of Higher Ed

A.I. will force us humans to double down on those talents and skills that only humans possess. The most important thing about A.I. may be that it shows us what it can’t do, and so reveals who we are and what we have to offer. New York Times

Even if detection software gets better at detecting AI generated text, it still causes mental and emotional strain when a student is wrongly accused. “False positives carry real harm,” he said. “At the scale of a course, or at the scale of the university, even a one or 2% rate of false positives will negatively impact dozens or hundreds of innocent students.” Washington Post

Ideas are more important than how they are written. So, I use ChatGPT to help me organize my ideas better and make them sound more professional. The Tech Insider

A.I. is good at predicting what word should come next, so you want to be really good at being unpredictable, departing from the conventional. New York Times 

We surpass the AI by standing on its shoulders. You need to ask, ‘How is it possibly incomplete?’” Inside Higher Ed

Our students are not John Henry, and AI is not a steam-powered drilling machine that will replace them. We don’t need to exhaust ourselves trying to surpass technology. Inside Higher Ed

These tools can function like personal assistants: Ask ChatGPT to create a study schedule, simplify a complex idea, or suggest topics for a research paper, and it can do that. That could be a boon for students who have trouble managing their time, processing information, or ordering their thoughts. Chronicle of Higher Ed

If the data set of writing on which the writing tool is trained reflects societal prejudices, then the essays it produces will likely reproduce those views. Similarly, if the training sets underrepresent the views of marginalized populations, then the essays they produce may omit those views as well. Inside Higher Ed

Students may be more likely to complete an assignment without automated assistance if they’ve gotten started through in-class writing. Critical AI

Rather than fully embracing AI as a writing assistant, the reasonable conclusion is that there needs to be a split between assignments on which using AI is encouraged and assignments on which using AI can’t possibly help. Chronicle of Higher Ed

“I think we should just get used to the fact that we won’t be able to reliably tell if a document is either written by AI — or partially written by AI, or edited by AI — or by humans,” computer science professor Soheil Feizi said. Washington Post

(A professor) plans to weave ChatGPT into lessons by asking students to evaluate the chatbot’s responses.New York Times

ChatGPT can play the role of a debate opponent and generate counterarguments to a student’s positions. By exposing students to an endless supply of opposing viewpoints, chatbots could help them look for weak points in their own thinking. MIT Tech Review

Assign reflection to help students understand their own thought processes and motivations for using these tools, as well as the impact AI has on their learning and writing. Inside Higher Ed 

Discuss students’ potentially diverse motivations for using ChatGPT or other generative AI software. Do they arise from stress about the writing and research process? Time management on big projects? Competition with other students? Experimentation and curiosity about using AI? Grade and/or other pressures and/or burnout? Invite your students to have an honest discussion about these and related questions. Cultivate an environment in your course in which students will feel comfortable approaching you if they need more direct support from you, their peers, or a campus resource to successfully complete an assignment. Barnard College 

We will need to teach students to contest it. Students in every major will need to know how to challenge or defend the appropriateness of a given model for a given question. To teach them how to do that, we don’t need to hastily construct a new field called “critical AI studies.” The intellectual resources students need are already present in the history and philosophy of science courses, along with the disciplines of statistics and machine learning themselves, which are deeply self-conscious about their own epistemic procedures. Chronicle of Higher Ed

We should be telling our undergraduates that good writing isn’t just about subject-verb agreement or avoiding grammatical errors—not even good academic writing. Good writing reminds us of our humanity, the humanity of others and all the ugly, beautiful ways in which we exist in the world. Inside Higher Ed 

Rather than trying to stop the tools and, for instance, telling students not to use them, in my class I’m telling students to embrace them – but I expect their quality of work to be that much better now they have the help of these tools. Ultimately, by the end of the semester, I'm expecting the students to turn in assignments that are substantially more creative and interesting than the ones last year’s students or previous generations of students could have created. We Forum 

Training ourselves and our students to work with AI doesn’t require inviting AI to every conversation we have. In fact, I believe it’s essential that we don’t.  Inside Higher Ed

If a professor runs students’ work through a detector without informing them in advance, that could be an academic-integrity violation in itself.  The student could then appeal the decision on grounds of deceptive assessment, “and they would probably win.” Chronicle of Higher Ed

How might chatting with AI systems affect vulnerable students, including those with depression, anxiety, and other mental-health challenges? Chronicle of Higher Ed 

Are we going to fill the time saved by AI with other low-value tasks, or will it free us to be more disruptive in our thinking and doing? I have some unrealistically high hopes of what AI can deliver. I want low-engagement tasks to take up less of my working day, allowing me to do more of what I need to do to thrive (thinking, writing, discussing science with colleagues). Nature

Let Kids Struggle

When children aren’t given the space to struggle through things on their own, they don’t learn to problem solve very well. They don’t learn to be confident in their own abilities, and it can affect their self-esteem. The other problem with never having to struggle is that you never experience failure and can develop an overwhelming fear of failure and of disappointing others. Both the low self-confidence and the fear of failure can lead to depression or anxiety.

I (am not) suggesting that grown kids should never call their parents. The devil is in the details of the conversation. If they call with a problem or a decision to be made, do we tell them what to do? Or do we listen thoughtfully, ask some questions based on our own sense of the situation, then say, “OK. So how do you think you’re going to handle that?”

Knowing what could unfold for our kids when they’re out of our sight can make us parents feel like we’re in straitjackets. What else are we supposed to do? If we’re not there for our kids when they are away from home and bewildered, confused, frightened, or hurting, then who will be?

Here’s the point—and this is so much more important than I realized until rather recently when the data started coming in: The research shows that figuring out for themselves is a critical element to people’s mental health. Your kids have to be there for themselves. That’s a harder truth to swallow when your kid is in the midst of a problem or worse, a crisis, but taking the long view, it’s the best medicine for them.

Julie Lythcott-Haims, How to Raise an Adult

19 free (mostly one hour) Journalism courses

Free short online courses to strengthen your skills and add a line to your resume. Most of these Poynter courses are one-hour in length or less.

Journalism Fundamentals: Craft & Values - A five-hour, self-directed course that covers basics in five areas: newsgathering, interviewing, ethics, law and diversity.

Telling Stories with Sound - Learn the fundamentals of audio reporting and editing in this self-directed course.

How to Spot Misinformation Online - Learn simple digital literacy skills to outsmart algorithms, detect falsehoods and make decisions based on factual information

Understanding Title IX - This course is designed to help journalists understand the applications of Title IX.

Clear, Strong Writing for Broadcast Journalism - One-hour video tutorial

Powerful Writing: Leverage Your Video and Sound - In this one-hour video tutorial, early-career journalists will learn how to seamlessly combine audio, video and copy in captivating news packages.

Writing for the Ear - In this five-part course, you’ll learn everything you need to write more effective audio narratives.

Fact-Check It: Digital Tools to Verify Everything Online 

News Sense: The Building Blocks of News - What makes an idea or event a news story?

Cleaning Your Copy: Grammar, Style and More - Finding and fixing the most common style, grammar and punctuation errors.

Avoiding Plagiarism and Fabrication - For authors, editors, educators, journalists, journalism students, news producers and news consumers

The Writer’s Workbench: 50 Tools You Can Use

Ethics of Journalism Build or refine your process for making ethical decisions

Conducting Interviews that Matter  

Make Design More Inclusive: Defeat Unconscious Bias in Visuals

Online Media Law: The Basics for Bloggers and Other Publishers -Three important areas of media law that specifically relate to gathering information and publishing online: defamation, privacy and copyright

Freedom of Information and Your Right to Know -How to use the Freedom of Information Act, Public Records Laws and Open Meetings Laws to uphold your right to know the government’s actions

Journalism and Trauma - How traumatic stress affects victims and how to interview trauma victims with compassion and respect

How Any Journalist Can Earn Trust (International Edition) -What news audiences in various parts of the world don’t understand about how journalism works

Tuesday Tech Tools: 28 Learning Sites (coding & professional development)

Academic Earth
More than 1,500 video lectures by professors from Harvard, Yale, broken down into single classes on topics like art, architecture, and astronomy. Free.

Code Cademy
Learn to code for free. Formal. Good reviews.

The Code Player
Learn to code through videos demonstrating actual typing of code to create items from scratch.

Colaboratory
An online code editor that exists right within Google Drive. Basically, its Google Docs for code. Write and execute code right in the browser. Only handles Python at the moment. Share files and have multiple people people edit them. Free.

Coursera
Learn to code through classes from accredited universities or develop yourself professionally. The courses are made up of lessons with multiple video lectures, along with readings, practice exercises, homework quizzes, and assignments. Most are free but have a cost if you want a certification. Limited help options.

Data Camp
Practice coding. See progress as you go. Free sign up.

Domestika
Mostly high quality online courses covering creative topics such as drawing, fine art, graphic design, arts and crafts, photography, etc. and some courses in business and design. No deadlines, learn at your own pace. Each course lasts from a couple of hours to 10+ hours and is divided into short lessons Certifications available. Most courses have a low fee ($10-$40) but some are free. Some courses are only available in Spanish with English subtitles.

FreeCodeCamp*
Founded by a schoolteacher turned programmer. Free, user-friendly hands-on online courses for beginners. Most courses run 300 hours. Positive reviews.

FurtureLearn
UK-based online learning platform. Earn a certificate with 3 or 4 classes (in 10 to 12 week blocks of learning). Mostly novice level content for job education. No phone apps and limited support. Some free tracks.

Google Code Playground
An advanced educational tool of Google’s Javascript APIs (application programming interfaces that simplify software implementing). Available for anyone to try out and tweak the code. Free but not for beginners.

Hands on Programming with R (free book)

How Cast
Free learning site divided into categories like environment, first aid, and parenting. Experts share their knowledge in videos that cover everything from surviving heart attacks to playing charades.

iTunes U
More than 350,000 free video lectures.

jQuery
Build coding projects to include in your portfolio, and collaborate with other members. A 4 question quiz matches you with the best course for you and your goals. Free 7 day trial if you enter a credit card number. $40 per month for unlimited courses.

Lynda Software Training*
Software training & tutorial video library. 

Kaggle Data Sets
A database of some 29k data sets for learning data science. There are more than a dozen free micro-courses for learning Python, machine learning, data viz, etc. Share/collaborate with others on the site.

Khan Academy
Tools for kids and adults in single, short lessons on a neon blackboard. More than 20,000 free videos. Free coding lessons with reputable content.

Learn Python the Hard Way
A book that introduces readers to Python.

MIT OpenCourseWare
For beginners. Textbook.

Mozilla Developer Network
Beginner friendly. Have to sign up to see. Positive reviews.

R for Data Science
Free Book. Good reviews for beginners.

Scratch
MIT-developed site tilted for children (but adults too) to learn coding basics focused on helping people create interactive stories, games, and animations. Free.

SoloLearn*
Free lessons on coding but with ads.

Stack Overflow
A popular programming problem-solving sites despite a number of negative reviews. Ask your coding questions as you learn or find chunks of code. Low as $5 a month.

StoryBench
Not hands on, more of a explanation of projects. Positive reviews.

TeamTreehouse
Tuturals on web design, coding, business, etc.  Students sign up for annual subscriptions.

Udacity
User-friendly online school focusing on job-related skills. Users very positive but expensive. $79 a month.

W3Schools Online Web Tutorials*
Learn HTML, CSS, etc. Easy-to-use. Navigate.

Curiosity primes the pump

The research tells us that curiosity matters for three primary reasons. First, inspiration is strongly correlated with an intrinsic desire to learn. Curiosity sparks inspiration. You learn more and more frequently because you are curious. Second, curiosity marks the beginning of a virtuous cycle that feeds your ability as a self-directed learner. Finally, research suggests that curiosity doesn’t diminish with age, so it can serve you at any point in your career. Although your learning methods will change over time, curiosity will keep the spark of motivation alive.   

Lisa Christensen, Jake Gittleson, and Matt Smith 

Napping Through Life

For men and women who have accepted the reality of change, the need for endless learning and trying is a way of living, a way of thinking, a way of being awake and ready. Life isn’t a train ride where you choose your destination, pay your fare and settle back for a nap. It’s a cycle ride over uncertain terrain, which you in the driver’s seat, constantly correcting your balance and determining the direction of progress. It’s difficult, sometimes profoundly painful. But its better than napping through life.  

John Gardner, Self-Renewal

real learning

In the early 1980s, two physicists at Arizona State University wanted to know whether a typical introductory physics course, with its traditional emphasis on Newton’s laws of motion, changed the way students thought about motion.

They gave the test to people entering the classes of four different physics professor, all good teachers, according to both colleagues and their students.

Did the course change student thinking? Not really. After the term was over, the two physicists gave their examination once more and discovered that the course had made comparatively small changes in the way students thought. Even many “A” students continued to think like Aristotle rather than like Newton. They had memorized formulae and learned to plug the right numbers into them, but they did not change their basic conceptions. Instead, they had interpreted everything they heard about motion in terms of the intuitive framework they had brought with them to the course.

The conducted individual interviews with some of the people who continued to reject Newton’s perspectives to see if they could dissuade them from their misguided assumptions. The students performed all kinds of mental gymnastics to avoid confronting and revising the fundamental underlying principles that guided their understanding of the physical universe.

Those physics students who made A’s yet failed to grasp anything about Newtonian concepts had not rebuilt their mental models about motion. They had merely learned to plug numbers into formulae without experiencing an expectation failure with the universes they imagined in their minds. They took all they heard from their professors and simply wrapped it around some pre-existing model of how motion works.

Perhaps because they were focused on grades rather than on understanding the physical universe, they didn’t care enough to grapple with their own ideas and build new paradigms of reality.

Ken Bain,  What the Best Teachers Do

The Best Advice I Ever Got.. Mohomed El-Erian

I remember asking my father, Why do we need four newspapers? He said to me, “Unless you read different points of view, your mind will eventually close, and you’ll become a prisoner to a certain point of view that you’ll never question.” There’s a tendency to operate in a comfort zone and to want to read what is familiar to them. But if you are just used to following one person or one newspaper, you will miss the big shifts.

Mohomed El-Erian, Pimco, quoted in Fortune Magazine

Keep Asking Questions

A few years ago, I got a call  (on my communication device) from a Pittsburgh author named Chip Walter. He was co-writing a book with William Shatner (a.k.a Kirk) about how scientific breakthroughs first imagined on Star Trek foreshadowed today’s technological advances. Captain Kirk wanted to visit my virtual reality lab at Carnegie Mellon. Shatner stayed for three hours and asked tons of questions. A colleague later said to me: “He just kept asking and asking. He doesn’t seem to get it.” But I was hugely impressed. Kirk, I mean, Shatner was the ultimate example of a man who knew what he didn’t know, was perfectly willing to admit it, and didn’t want to leave until he understood. That’s heroic to me. I wish every grad student had that attitude.

Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture

What know-it-alls don’t know

Know-it-alls can be insufferable, and now there’s new evidence that they know less than they’d have you believe. Researchers from Cornell and Tulane universities found that self-proclaimed experts are more prone to “overclaiming”—essentially, pretending to have extensive knowledge of something they’re clueless about. In the study, 100 volunteers were asked to rate their level of knowledge in various subjects, such as biology, literature, and personal finance. When quizzed on 15 different economic terms, the people who fancied themselves financial gurus were far more likely to claim they were familiar with phenomena such as “pre-rated stocks” and “fixed-rate deduction” that were actually complete fictions. Tests on the other topics revealed similar results—even when participants were warned that some terms would be phony. “Our work suggests that the seemingly straightforward task of judging one’s knowledge may not be so simple,” researcher Stav Atir tells Science Daily, “particularly for individuals who believe they have a relatively high level of knowledge to begin with.”

The Week Magazine, August 7, 2015

Unlearning

When you discover the fatal love letter or get the news that you’ve been fired, it’s pointless to talk about old realities and new ones. But later, it is important to reflect on these things, for with realities as with identities and connections, the old must be cleared away before the new can grow. The mind is a vessel that must be emptied if new wine is to be put in.

This process is hard to take in more than just a natural, personal sense; it goes against the grain of our culture, which tends to view growth as an additive process. We did not have to unlearn the first grade to go on to the second, for example, forget Sunday school when we joined the church.

The entire termination process violates our too-seldom examined idea that development means gain and has nothing to do with less.

William Bridges, Transitions

Motivation doesn’t equal Achievement

You might think it is safe to assume that, once you motivate students, the learning will follow. Yet research shows that this is often not the case: motivation doesn’t always lead to achievement, but achievement often leads to motivation. If you try to ‘motivate’ students into public speaking, they might feel motivated but can lack the specific knowledge needed to translate that into action. However, through careful instruction and encouragement, students can learn how to craft an argument, shape their ideas and develop them into solid form. 

A lot of what drives students is their innate beliefs and how they perceive themselves. There is a strong correlation between self-perception and achievement, but there is some evidence to suggest that the actual effect of achievement on self-perception is stronger than the other way round. To stand up in a classroom and successfully deliver a good speech is a genuine achievement, and that is likely to be more powerfully motivating than woolly notions of ‘motivation’ itself.  

Carl Hendrick writing in Aeon

The Growth Mindset

When people believe that failure is not a barometer of innate characteristics but rather view it as a step to success (a growth mindset), they are far more likely to put in the kinds of effort that will eventually lead to that success. By contrast, those who believe that success or failure is due to innate ability (a fixed mindset) can find that this leads to a fear of failure and a lack of effort.

Carl Hendrick writing in Aeon

Do you understand a thing or only its definition?

We take other men’s knowledge and opinions upon trust; which is an idle and superficial learning. We must make them our own. We are just like a man who, needing fire, went to a neighbor’s house to fetch it, and finding a very good one there, sat down to warm himself without remembering to carry any back home. What good does it do us to have our belly full of meat if it is not digested, if it is not transformed into us, if it does not nourish and support us?

Montaigne 

Straight A’s won’t matter in real life

When I was in college, I obsessed over getting straight A’s, said Adam Grant. Now that I’m a professor, “I watch in dismay” when I see students joining the same “cult of perfectionism.” They think straight A’s will provide entrée to elite graduate schools and prestigious careers. The evidence, however, says otherwise. Research across industries shows that while there’s a modest correlation between grades and job performance the first year out of college, after a few years, the difference is “trivial.” Why? “Getting straight A’s requires conformity. Having an influential career demands originality.” While straight-A students are locked in their dorm rooms or library pursuing “meaningless perfection,” their peers are developing skills that aren’t captured by grades: “creativity, leadership, and teamwork skills and social, emotional, and political intelligence.” Real career success doesn’t come from “finding the right solution to a problem—it’s more about finding the right problem to solve.” In high school Steve Jobs pulled a 2.65 GPA, J.K. Rowling had a C average at Exeter, and Martin Luther King Jr. managed only one A in four years at Morehouse College. This tells us that “underachieving in school can prepare you to overachieve in life.”

Adam Grant writing in The New York Times (as quoted in The Week Magazine