I suck at [formal] education or does education suck?

Oct 04 2011 Tags: , , , ,

Animal Development

Image by Wolfram Burner via Flickr

There is probably a trend where I make a post about education every year around October, January and June. It corresponds nicely with the school year and how exams are laid out.

But this time the post is going to be different:

  • this is not a rant
  • this does not propose a solution
  • this is just a set of observations

To give a bit of background: last year I advanced into the next year (set of two semesters) of my course through a little bit of dumb luck because the terms of advancing were lowered somewhat so enough of us could get through to fill up the year. This meant that I had a lot of exams left over and through naught other than poor planning, too many difficult exams stacked up to September and I subsequently failed catastrophically and was forced to transfer to a three year bachelor’s course within a new education system.

Wow … that was a mouthful. I hope anyone understood even a fragment of that.

And now the observations:

  1. I have always been very interested in learning new things. Spending frustrating amounts of time to figure out how something works has never been a problem and I have probably spent more time learning things on my own than in a formal education setting.
  2. I have never been very good at passing exams of any kind. If you ask me to display a certain skill at a particular moment in time … I will fail. The last time this wasn’t a problem was in 5th grade of primary school. Why, I don’t know.
  3. I have always had trouble following a forced pace of learning. It tends to be too generally applicative and usually ends up being too slow for me. Because it doesn’t tax me enough, I tend to drift away and start learning things on my own. Then I get pulled away by learning shiny cool things and forget to follow along with the formal education. (like when you’re reading a book and your mind drifts)
  4. Invariably because I don’t follow along a formal class eventually surpasses my ability to quickly get back on track and I fall behind.
  5. I can usually learn a whole semester worth of a formal class in about two weeks of concentrated studying, but exams are always set up in such a way as to make it impossible to concentrate on a single class for two weeks … you’re supposed to follow along for the whole 3 months.
  6. I get genuinely excited about most theoretical and practical things they want to teach/show us at school
  7. The productive output of most of my classmates is abysmal
  8. The forced productive output of most of my classmates makes me want to scream when I look at it
  9. Most of my classmates get genuinely frustrated when asked to produce something significant-ish or learn a completely new concept
  10. A lot of my classmates passed their exams and advanced into the next year. Even the ones I have personally worked with on coursework and shouldn’t be more than freshmen if it were up to me
  11. A favourite professor of mine can’t hold class this year because the peer review process in his field is slow and he didn’t meet some arbitrarily defined quota for published articles

You can draw your own conclusions. Mine is that the education system as I know it is designed to prefer a different set of skills than I posses and for whatever reason I have so far been unable to hack the system to my advantage.

But I shan’t let this discourage me. I’m going to graduate with a bachelor’s in computer science by next October if it kills me … even if I originally signed up for a master’s equivalent.

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7 responses so far

  • No

    Hej. Ze dolgo casa berem tvoj blog. Prav rad bi te enkrat povabil na pivo.
    Sej je fajn, ce ima clovek nek naziv in papir o solanju ampak koliko sem imel priloznost sledit tvojim projektom ti lahko recem, da razturas. Taki ljudje, kot si ti bodo uspesni tudi brez papirja

  • Anonymous

    Education sucks, more or less. I had a similar experience to yours and my observations align quite well with yours as well. For me, the primary failing with the educational system was in a mismatch between the sort of digested bite size “factlets” that most courses are designed to feed students and the larger concepts and theories that I looked for to attempt to understand a subject. I’ve always leaned towards a more intuitive style of understanding in that I concentrate on the larger patterns and can usually derive the finer details once I’ve grasped the big picture. Most school courses (both in grade schools, and later to a thankfully lesser extend in college) are designed around the concept of providing students a collection of small disconnected facts to be memorized and then later on to explain how to assemble the various smaller facts into a proper understanding of the subject. This is a somewhat understandable approach in the general case, but fails miserably for someone like me. Because of this failing since somewhere around middle school I’ve been primarily self educated. This isn’t to say that I haven’t had formal education, or even that I didn’t learn anything in any of the classes, it’s just that the classes have always acted as supplements to my independent learning.

  • http://swizec.com Swizec

    Hej, komot me povabis na pivo :)

    Me veseli, da se ti zdi da razturam, fora papirja ni da ga rabim ampak da ga _hocem_.

  • http://swizec.com Swizec

    Yeah, I never understood going from small concepts up to the overarching theory. It makes more sense to get a sense of the general stuff and then drill down on the details.

    Imagine if we wanted to understand physics and started off with the concept of quantum particles. Now figure out how a building behaves in a storm …

  • http://bloomsight.wordpress.com/ Natasha

    I loved this post. I can relate to a lot of your observations. 
    Thanks for linking my post! 

    Note:
    The poem that the post features was written by a Ugandan student in the village I worked in for three months this past summer. When I was there, I felt a lot of frustration witnessing how the education system was structured there (poor teacher-pupil ratios, low teacher morale, few resources, and barely half a library), and I thought it was interesting to see how the things students learned in that school system corresponded in a very limited way to their lives. Many of those students knew way more about how things worked than their textbooks taught them. They simply memorized facts to pass exams… simply because going through the formal education system is the only way they can attain higher education, and ultimately achieving social and economic status to help their family in the rural, poorer areas of Uganda.

    Coming home from that placement has definitely been sort of difficult for me, too. I think that I don’t take classroom learning as seriously now that I’ve gone through my placement and learned from doing and seeing and being there. 

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