Week9: Our study habits..

    This week’s discussion made me recall the question that I often raise with my friends “How much a student learn from the typical studying?”. I always try not to impose my opinion even if it’s right.. Hold on a second.! What do you mean right?! Right to who..!?.. Oh yeah, I am sorry, it’s just right to me.. It could be wrong from another’s point of view. But anyway, diversity of thoughts is always a healthy phenomenon.

The experience has proved to me that most of our study habits are, unfortunately, old-fashioned. How do we call it then when the student spends 12 years of his life at least, starting by the elementary school up to the high school, and when you ask him/her what are you good at, or what are your strengths? They just stand mute not to know what to answer..! Who is responsible for that?! Isn’t the educational insinuations and teachers?! Why do they insist on giving the same dose with the same amount to all students..?! Didn’t they realize that everyone is different form the other?! That’s how we were created, and based on that we should be working with people around us including our students..

You imagine with me, how would it look like if we just focus on our students’ talents and help them use those talents the right way?! I can imagine a society full of thousands of  people like Al-Khwārizmī, Ibn al-Nafis, Edison, Shakespeare..etc. Kids are like a clay, you shape it the way you want, you make it the shape you want. It’s our responsibility, whether we are parents or teachers, to try to find those kid’s talents and offer them to the world, and get the rewards and words of thanks for offering that genius..  or the opposite could be done quite easily “bury it” and get the condemnation and humiliation forever.

In school, Edison’s would often wander that made his teacher call him “addled” and that was the last straw that broke the camel's back. He left the school just after three months of official schooling. He recalled later, "My mother was the making of me. She was so true, so sure of me; and I felt I had something to live for, someone I must not disappoint." His mother homeschooled him. It’s his mother who got the credit for that and it’s his teacher who’s still blamed for wasn't able to identify his talent.

Like Edison, the cornerstone of the modern Arabic literature “Mostafa Saadeq Al-Rafe'ie”, he dropped out the official schooling because of a hearing disability, but that fact did not stop him, rather his dad who was a learned man, put a huge library in his hands that he would spend most of his time in, and eventually the most famous Arab poet of the early twentieth century came out of that library.

Examples are endless in this regard, in every society and every culture, and I’m not against official schooling, this is an extreme that I am not in favor with, however I don’t like either the end of the other extreme. We want to hold the stick form the middle, to give a space to our children and students, to find exactly what everyone is really good at. As I said in one of my posts this week “what fits X student doesn’t necessarily fit Y” and based on this fact we should move. If you see your student has sort of tendency towards something, whatever that might be, don’t be a stumbling block on his path, rather, be a bridge to the area where he/she fits best. That way we can guarantee perfect education, perfect generation and obviously perfect outcome.

We got our projects done too, and we had the chance to get to know Tom and Max, Editors of the FORUM. Big thanks to both. They reminded us this valuable magazine.