Let's Have a Serious Conversation About School
Imagine yourself sitting a test, it is a place where many of us have been, and most have dreaded. What about an exam? You might have remembered being nervous, your fleeting heart as the timer counted down, ever spiralling towards the inevitable point in time where you would have to hand up your papers, to be judged by strangers that you have likely never met. And that judgement, that one exam, could have consequences as far reaching as to alter the entire course of your life. It could intrinsically alter your chances at a decent career. All of this weight counts against a single assignment, currently it is 30% for year twelve students completing their SACE - what if you were nervous? What if you had a headache, not serious enough for a medical certificate, though enough to affect your results? What if there is some freak accident and you are five minutes late? Or, perhaps even more blatant, what if you cannot remember a single, though crucial, piece of information?
Now, I would like you to raise your hand if you have an internet connected device on you at this very moment. Yes, all of you reading this. I would like you to think of the last time that you were without a device, a single moment where you didn't have all the world's vast knowledge at your fingertips. For most of you that was probably the last time your phone went flat on the bus because you were playing a game on the way home from school or work. Yet, with this vast availability of knowledge, ever at our fingertips, school systems still rely on archaic methods of testing that were created in a pre-internet era, to test memory rather than understanding. We have glasses that you can wear that will tell you how to build jet engines. You can talk to your phone and computers and ask what the weather will be like across the world from you. Yet we are still testing memory over understanding. I ask you all what you would rather, a doctor that may have to do a little googling, though understands your medical condition and knows how to fix it, or a doctor that knows exactly what your condition is, though hasn't the faintest idea of what it is, because he was trained to remember for his exam rather than understand.
This may be a harsh view, and I understand. But at the end of the day, you can ask basically any student and they will echo what I have said. At this stage you may ask yourself how exactly this can be amended, exams have been used, arguably, since the beginning of schooling. The answer is simple, students are already doing it. Assignments. Every student reading this just shuddered at that word, however, I ask you to think about it, would you rather have a week to think through a problem, understand it, and answer it cohesively. Or given fifteen minutes on a long response question, the answer of which you can't remember because your hand was cramping but you had to finish the exam. In this utopian future I so lovingly envisage, assignments wouldn't be the same, boring, repetitive things they are today, each would be unique, different. This can already be seen in modern education, with the rise of technology, videos and websites are becoming the mainstream method of doing assignments in some classes and schools. And they are enjoyable, allowing a student to ask their own questions and think through and solve problems, rather than reciting half-remembered knowledge that you forget a few weeks later.
However, exams are not the only issue with school as it currently stands. I dont know how many of you have been through high school recently, but it is super easy, to the point of being mind-numbingly so - for the first few years. Until you hit years eleven and twelve. At this point your life becomes a sleepless hell, moving from one assignment to the next and if you didnt like coffee before you do now because you will need it. Why is school so top heavy? Surely some of the things in year eleven and twelve could be moved to the earlier years where most students are idling through school.
Overall, I believe that education requires serious reform in how it manages workloads, and asseses students if we hope to effectively teach students in a modern world. However, this is only one example of how archaic the school system is, one person's view. As such I implore each of you to ask questions, to think about how we can better equip the next generation in a technological era.
Now, I would like you to raise your hand if you have an internet connected device on you at this very moment. Yes, all of you reading this. I would like you to think of the last time that you were without a device, a single moment where you didn't have all the world's vast knowledge at your fingertips. For most of you that was probably the last time your phone went flat on the bus because you were playing a game on the way home from school or work. Yet, with this vast availability of knowledge, ever at our fingertips, school systems still rely on archaic methods of testing that were created in a pre-internet era, to test memory rather than understanding. We have glasses that you can wear that will tell you how to build jet engines. You can talk to your phone and computers and ask what the weather will be like across the world from you. Yet we are still testing memory over understanding. I ask you all what you would rather, a doctor that may have to do a little googling, though understands your medical condition and knows how to fix it, or a doctor that knows exactly what your condition is, though hasn't the faintest idea of what it is, because he was trained to remember for his exam rather than understand.
This may be a harsh view, and I understand. But at the end of the day, you can ask basically any student and they will echo what I have said. At this stage you may ask yourself how exactly this can be amended, exams have been used, arguably, since the beginning of schooling. The answer is simple, students are already doing it. Assignments. Every student reading this just shuddered at that word, however, I ask you to think about it, would you rather have a week to think through a problem, understand it, and answer it cohesively. Or given fifteen minutes on a long response question, the answer of which you can't remember because your hand was cramping but you had to finish the exam. In this utopian future I so lovingly envisage, assignments wouldn't be the same, boring, repetitive things they are today, each would be unique, different. This can already be seen in modern education, with the rise of technology, videos and websites are becoming the mainstream method of doing assignments in some classes and schools. And they are enjoyable, allowing a student to ask their own questions and think through and solve problems, rather than reciting half-remembered knowledge that you forget a few weeks later.
However, exams are not the only issue with school as it currently stands. I dont know how many of you have been through high school recently, but it is super easy, to the point of being mind-numbingly so - for the first few years. Until you hit years eleven and twelve. At this point your life becomes a sleepless hell, moving from one assignment to the next and if you didnt like coffee before you do now because you will need it. Why is school so top heavy? Surely some of the things in year eleven and twelve could be moved to the earlier years where most students are idling through school.
Overall, I believe that education requires serious reform in how it manages workloads, and asseses students if we hope to effectively teach students in a modern world. However, this is only one example of how archaic the school system is, one person's view. As such I implore each of you to ask questions, to think about how we can better equip the next generation in a technological era.
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