I’m sure many of us have felt like school is some facade of the real world.  There are all these hoops of fire that must be jumped through in order to please the crowd of public opinion all for the sake of climbing up the ladder rung by rung.  What ladder is this?  It is often called success where hard work and time are proportional to the amount of success one has. Sometimes there are those who blow smoke in their superiors’ faces in order to mask the amount of effort they are putting in (and depending on what our lens to the world is they can be viewed as unlucky or lucky). These are the rare cases, though. 
Most of us know hard work is the real way to get recognized for one’s ability. School was probably one of the first institutions to teach us this.  At an early age, we learned if we memorized how to spell everything on our vocabulary list we would receive an A.  This trick works for a long time until there is that one teacher who makes you actually learn the material. We either loathe or love him or her for the way he or she made us work harder than remembering the sin (2π) = 0, but the bottom line is, at some point we have to deal with said teacher.
If we chose to loathe him or her, then the easy road here is to, of course, blame the teacher.  Once we have motive for disliking said teacher and his/her pedagogical methods we take our microscope and hone in on all the reasons why this teacher sucks. Soon enough your only motive for staying in the class will be for the teacher evaluation where you can unleash all of your critiques. This may be the only way to justify the C, D or F you may end up getting and, for some, that is just enough. But that’s just a cop out. 
If there is one thing I hear consistently around campus it is the griping that goes on about students who “really like the class but hate the way the teacher teaches it.”  I would say this has happened at least once to everybody. This is just another rung in the ladder of life, though.  We run into a problem and we immediately have the option to pass the buck instead of looking at the bigger picture.  So OK, your teacher would not let you use a calculator on the calculus final, but the bottom line still comes out a week later when the grades hit.
Not every teacher is going to teach to you the perfect way.  It is the teacher’s job to deliver the information as best as he or she can, and as the student, our job is to seek knowledge in our field with tenacity, avidity and an unquenchable desire.  That is why we are in college, isn’t it?  We are here because learning makes us feel alive and excites us.  We should be addicted to the high that “ah ha” moment brings, even if it means we have to seek it ourselves.  Just because the delivery is off shouldn’t change the way we digest the information.  The teacher can’t be expected to know how each of his 100+ students learn, regardless of how hard he or she tries. Students are responsible for learning the material and not depending on or blaming the instructors. 
There are two ways this perseverance can be viewed: lying down and taking the beating as best as you can or putting everything you have to learn the material front to back. The latter is a daunting challenge of course but is extremely rewarding. It brings about pride and self-confidence. We might feel defeated and cheated along the way but, like a Monet, when we have enough distance the bigger picture comes into view: we are learning life lessons. School might be the exact artificial environment we assume it to be, but it still nonetheless has invaluable lessons to teach.  When the going gets tough we should remember we are here to learn our craft because we chose to study it and devote our minds and time to it. Even learning has its cost (textbooks included) but it also has robust rewards.