My School Life
My childhood was a great one, I mean, I grew up reading anything I can lay my hands on those days, I grew up visiting different museums, going to the zoo to learn about different kinds of animals and so on.
There is something about asking a question and finding the right answer that satisfies me, but what really excites me very much is being able to do something with that answer. It’s actually the difference between knowledge and wisdom. A seed of curiosity has already been planted in my mind at an early age, and that is still inside me up till now.
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From crèche to kindergarten, I was made to understand how to read, write and count. I learnt about different animals, plants, and the world. School was exciting and fun back then. The question is why just read about the different parts of the plant when you could label the construction paper parts and glue them together like a puzzle? To me, school was some sort of paradise or any good place you could think of.
So, as I moved higher (from primary to high school and from high school to the university), the love I had for school started dwindling because everything changed, the enthusiasm I used to have about learning was gone, it was all about cramming to get the A’s and nothing more, this was also the mindset of everyone around me. The university was even the worst, the lecturers will force you to cram useless information which you cannot even use or apply to solve any societal problem. They will try to shove abstract ideas into your brain as fast as possible for you to understand what they are saying without them showing you the real or physical thing they are talking about and expecting the information to just sink so fast like that. Even if you don’t understand them, they will tell you to memorize it just to get your A’s on the exam and move on.
School for me was becoming a place where you cram or memorize what you are being taught just to get good grades and not to know the actual thing being taught. It slowly became a place of cramming information just long enough to get the A’s, to be better than your classmates. If you ask an important question in the class, the lecturer will tell you that you are supposed to be smart enough to know the answer. Even when you cram for exams you tend to forget those things some hours later or the next morning. In this scientific age we tend to have unlimited resources like the internet, the library, our peers.etc. we get together with our classmates and use our resources to work through a complex critical thinking question that relates to the real world as well as the subject. That is how you grow the mind in order to solve a real world problem. That is how you engage students, and cause them to be enthusiastic about learning and about a certain subject. It is not that I’m advocating for testing and homework or assignments to be scrapped, but about the learning experience.
Testing should use a combination of critical thinking and prior knowledge; it shouldn’t isolate the part of the brain that cram information or facts, because most of the students fail to understand what they cram.
How I miss the days of kindergarten when school was a place where teachers taught slowly, treating their pupils as equals and engaging with them in meaningful conversations. School should be a place where the teachers or lecturers should welcome questions of all kinds, and actually allows time to ask them and also give the students the right answers to the questions being asked.
To me, I would say school has been stressful to some extent but that doesn’t mean I will stop learning because it has been said the day you stop learning is the day you start dyeing and despite what I have said I wouldn’t trade my knowledge for anything. I have often said to myself no matter where I go or I found myself I will always love learning and also strive to know more.
Very nice post