Now that the school semester has come to an end, I have time to reflect on my classes and school work. As I sit and think, I have come upon a grand idea about classes. You ready for it??
I think that it is wrong to hold students to such a high standard coming into a new class. You see, we have no idea, for the most part, what we got ourselves into. Some of us read the course outline, which gives us only a very small bit of information pertaining to the course. School has turned into "how do we pass?" not "how do we learn?"Students are so concerned with passing tests and getting good grades, that we really aren't focused on learning to an extent. Let me explain my thinking.
So in my lifetime, I have never been a good test taker... I hate how people don't study and always get good grades. I study constantly and can never seem to get good grades on tests. But! I've noticed that I improve slightly in my test grades from start to finish of the course. That's because we don't really know what to expect. There's really no way to know what the teacher is going to do on a test or a quiz, even if they try to give you tips or information about it. The first day of classes, we all sit around and do the same thing... We introduce ourselves, we may have to say something about our interests or etc, then we all go over the syllabus. The syllabus becomes your bible in a sense because usually the teacher puts all the due dates, dates that we come to class or don't have school etc. Everyone abides by the same grading system, and we pray to be at the top of that scale. But how can we be held to the same standards of grading from the beginning of the semester to the end of the semester? The information is so new, we haven't studied the information before, we don't know what the teacher is looking for in our answers, the list goes on. I don't think that teachers can hold their students to such high standards in the beginning of the semester. I think there should be some wiggle room with scores. Take my Communication disorders class, for example, my first test was 3 chapters worth of information and I failed it. Even though I studied, I failed. That's very disheartening because you work hard and it doesn't pay off. But I work my butt off throughout the semester and me, along with my classmates, get more settled in and realized what our teacher wants from us; then we begin to improve. By the end of the semester I am passing all my assignments! Now take my edu 106 class: "new literacies". I had no idea what to expect in the class, although I thought I was pretty tech savvy but there was so much information to learn! I was lucky enough to have a teacher who understood that we needed trial and error before we could succeed at learning.
I think a lot of people would agree with me that the atmosphere has changed in school; we are trying to pass, not trying to learn.
I hope this makes sense. Thanks for reading!
