Finding right balance

In many ways, school, I’m afraid, has become a metaphor for a non-life. This is sad because school is really supposed to offer you the skills you need for life. It’s not meant to drill rote learning into you. School is supposed to make you think. Above all, it should be fun — not an endless grind.

If adults work ten hours a day and take no time for leisure activities, we frown on them and categorise them as workaholics, but we expect students to go to school, study and take extra lessons for the same amount of time. Extra lessons have become a big business, a machine for turning out robots who can spit out facts and information. There is no reason why students shouldn’t be able to learn everything they need to learn in school. It’s all a vicious circle. Part of the problem is that students waste much of their time in school so that they can sit in extra lessons, many of which are nothing more than a big lime.

Surely there’s a better way of managing time. I don’t believe in extra lessons or homework. When I taught English, I assigned half an hour of reading a night and nothing more. Every student should read at least half an hour a night and that reading should have nothing to do with school. It should be built into their leisure time schedule because nothing — not even texting, Facebook time, video games or tweeting — is more satisfying than reading. Nothing builds those lifelong comprehension and analytical skills we need than reading. But, back to school reading…

In my English classes, I had a short, five-question quiz to make sure students read, and then we devoted the rest of our class to talking about the reading, writing exercises and projects. I found it useless to send students home to write a bad essay that I had to pull apart like buss-up-shut. I wanted to see students writing in class so I could help them shape that essay from the beginning, and I wanted to know their thinking process, where they got stuck and how they moved on. Most of all, I didn’t want to spend time checking for plagiarism.

This in-class writing process made sense to me because, school-based assessments aside, all the essays students had to write for exams required on-the-spot writing. In-class writing assured me that students could work through the process of procrastination in a timely fashion with a few nudges from me. At home, they could turn on the computer, get something to eat, text a friend. It is unfair to expect students to do homework.

More and more studies show that a shorter work day inspires more creativity and productivity. Big companies in Europe — especially in Scandinavia — know this and they’ve shortened their work day. Yet, we pile more and more work on students and expect them to comply and sacrifice meaningful leisure activity. Students need to participate in sports and hobbies. They need balance. It’s time for everyone to reconsider this e n d l e s s , academic treadmill we have students on because they’re running fast and going nowhere.