In grade school some teachers might care if you get a bad grade and pull you aside for extra study, but most don't care and wouldn't bat an eye at giving you a D or F and calling it your fault. Theyll contact your parents, maybe. College is even more like that, you can fail every single class and no one will give a single fuck about helping you, they'll just make you pay more to retake or place you on academic probation. But at the end of the day, it's seen as your problem one way or the other. You take the F, not the teacher or school.
Work isn't like that. If there's an employee actively failing at their job, even if it's just perceived as a failure, that's unacceptable and needs to be immediately corrected because it 'reflects badly on the team' (i.e. profit). Or maybe their 'bad habits will spread to others'. So middle managers have an incentive to ride you and micromanage you much more than ever happens at school.
So for 20+ years of my life, I got used to taking the bad grade from time to time if I needed to, or just skip classes or homework altogether knowing that I could pass the tests and get a passing grade easy in the end. But this behavior is unacceptable in adult working life, because incentives tie some people to your individual success and makes it their personal problem, too. It no longer remains a question of how well you do in the end, but also how you do it. That's one of the reasons why you get these insane middle managers trying to control every aspect of their employees' work (and home) life.
I always did well in school but I'm an average or even below average worker because of this.
Maybe we should assign a middle manager to every 10 students in school so they can make sure everyone's actions reflect well on the school's bottom line to better simulate real work. Or maybe it's a dumbass and counterproductive idea to micromanage people in that way. But what do I know.