They say experience is the best teacher I believe that as we grow, we finally come to understand the meaning of this saying well. Just two days ago I was telling my friends that we have been in school all our lives and some of us still want to go back to school. Honestly, in Africa, most people go to school especially to do their masters or PhD just to escape unemployment. There are no jobs even after your first degree and so instead of staying at home and being frustrated, people just enrol for further studies.
If only they had the chance to work and earn a living, most people wouldn’t even bother to pay again for masters or even PhD. Looking at the western world, most people do not go back to school after college and even as they are in high school and even college, they still have flexible schedules to work while schooling. I can’t say same for Africa because it’s more like the system in working against you. Back in the university and even today, I still feel some of our lecturers were more like our enemies of progress because they literally wanted us to fail all the time. Why do I say this? I’m a teacher now and so I’m able to see things from both perspectives.
I’ve been a student and now I’m a teacher. I see the struggles these students go through on daily basis and I’m able to relate with them because I was in their shoes a while back. Being a student is hard. Having to study everyday, go to class, have a life and so much more is just exhausting. For average students, you can imagine the extra work they have to put in to make things work for them academically. Every student is different, we have the extremely smart ones who will party all semester and still pass their exams and then, we have those who have to sit their butts down and burn the midnight candle to make the grades.
At some point in my school life, I came to realise I was working hard, but not smart. I would study the whole night and still not be able to ace my exams like I wanted to until I found my style of learning. I’m very good at cramming but I only do that in desperate times. Regardless, the goal was to pass the exams for most part of my school life. One thing I’ve come to realise about most students is that we learn to pass and not to know and that alone takes away the beauty of everything and I learnt this the hard way. When you learn to know, you’re indirectly learning smart but when you learn to pass, you’ll have to work hard with little to no results sometimes.
Exams are not meant to be hard. It’s more like a test to make you know your strengths and weaknesses . Students dread exams so much these days. I remember having an open book test in level 200 and even with our phones and lecture notes, we still couldn’t answer most of the questions. How do you search for something you have no understanding of. We had all the materials at our disposal but we still couldn’t find our way around it because we didn’t even know what the whole concept was about.
Now, we have the emergence of AI and all these technological tools which in a way have made students very lazy instead of boosting their productivity. Imagine giving out an assignment where all the answers are in the handout and these students still go and copy wrong answers from AI for you. It’s frustrating, but that’s what the world has come to. Even now, I believe examinations have become more flexible than before. Back in my day, we used to write objectives and theory for exams but now it’s strictly objectives. Even though it’s standard, I believe it’s still flexible. But you know students, not everyone would be able to make it.
Taking a look into things, I believe the problem is not entirely related to the educational system but also the students. While the educational system need to be worked on drastically,these students also need a mentality shift so as to make everything easier on both sides. That’s the only way we will move forward and do better in this era of technology.
all images belong to me.
