Dealing with students who are overly motivated Occasionally I have students who are 'overmotivated': they put way too much effort in to trying to memorize every word of the textbook, every idea, each diagram I draw... They spend all of their off hours, all evening and weekend, reading, rereading, underlining, highlighting, going over the same pages again and again. I look at their textbook and nearly every word is underlined and/or highlighted!

For example, when I project the textbook, there might be a few lines or words on each page that I have underlined, which I explain. I try to cover those vital ideas at least three times on different days and in different ways. There are parts of textbooks where I say "skip this, we will get to it later." These students then come to me with questions about that. I am fine if they want to learn it now instead of later, but I am not fine if they are struggling, drowning in concepts, burning themselves in to the ground, and they try to take on that needless idea that I told them to skip.

What do you do with students like this? I am in the USA, so I am not expecting this level of intensity. It is working against these students' progress.
I don't think this is really a CS problem - though of course some individuals do get "addicted" to computing.

The root of the problem is that these students don't know how to study - and ironically, it's quite likely that the education system they are progressing through has never even tried to teach them that basic skill. But you don't have time to teach them that, and teach the contents of your CS course as well.

Students who have found everything "easy" since the start of their education are often the worst sufferers - eventually they hit the brick wall where just listening to the teacher and "getting it" with no effort doesn't work any more, and then they are completely lost.

The best solution would be to try to get a general "how to study" course into the curriculum for every student - or at the least, start your course by giving them some guidelines (including notes to refer back to!) on the study strategies that work, and those that don't.

But you can only lead the horse to the water - as somebody once said, "Homo sapiens has a fundamental design defect: most members of the species can learn, but none of them can be taught."