Getting through

T -1 day to promotional exams. The going metaphor is that the exams are like a door to get through, which makes sense. Once past that door, the successful get to face a new arena containing a new set of trials and tribulations to traverse before they arrive at the next door.

Some kids think that they need a 'passport' or a 'password' to get through the door, and that they can find it in the assigned reading materials or last-minute hints dropped by their tutors in the last days leading up to the exams. But they are being silly. The fact is, there is no one guarding the door to hear the password or stamp the passport. The door is simply locked.

Who has the key, then? The good news is, there is no 'Master' key, so there is no need to scramble for a limited resource that doesn't exist. There is also no need to acquire a key in a standard design, because there isn't one either. Remember the trials and tribulations mentioned above? They exist to train each student how to pick the lock for themselves. Yes, not a key, but a set of lock-picking tools unlocks the door to the next level.

I like the lock-pick metaphor because unlike keys; passports; and passwords that only work once per door, we always hold on to our lock-picks, find new ways to manipulate them and pick up new upgrades along the way. Lock-picks work on every door, and how they are used is unique to the user, as long as they consistently practice their skills, being in the moment and not constantly worrying about the next door ahead.

Cliched, but if people valued the journey rather than the destination, they'd have less anxiety approaching their exams.

The mask that students wear

The biggest stress factor in being a student is being a student. The "student" is a mask that kids wear to play a game involving arbitrary and often unnecessarily petty rules of conduct and impossibly difficult tasks that have little to no bearing on who they really are under their masks. The students we meet in class are pale shells of who they really are. It is when they are not in school that's where we find their true selves.

Keeping the two identities apart for a sustained period every school day makes school the torture that it is for most kids. The ones who suffer the most are the ones who have the clearest sense of self identity -- the musicians, the dancers, the athletes, the computer whizzes and the entrepreneurs -- who have to keep their real selves hidden while they pretend to be sheep when in school.

The identity of the "student" is formless and shapeless. Always incomplete, and hence always having to defer to the wisdom and authority of the "teacher". Students have nothing to say because they don't know enough. They are lumps of clay or rock which submit to the hands of the teacher who sculpts and molds them to whatever shape the school needs them to be -- usually a cube or a brick that easily fits in with everybody else who has been successfully 'bricked' after doing their required schooling time in their turn.

Schools and parents emphasize that exams are their kids' top priority. Everything else can wait until all the prerequisite 'A's have been garnered and paraded among family members and the education community. All the more so among the tuition agencies for whom exam results are their raison d'etre thus making the "student" identity perfectly solid. In the meantime, the identities which have been kept hidden often get forgotten or shelved in the process of brick-making.

Kids hate school because schools subvert individual identity, and level every student towards the lowest common denominator. The tasks they are assigned, the subjects they grapple with, the pressure they get to do their best apply to their student selves, but are completely irrelevant to their real selves. On our part, as teachers, we are stymied as to how to motivate our kids to work harder and do better; and for other kids who have no identity beyond the mask they wear, how to manage their stress before they go bonkers.

What if kids and schools agreed to dispense with the "student" mask and allow their true selves to flourish instead? We take the emphasis away from common exams in favour of allowing the kids to develop themselves as musicians, dancers, and whatever else they see themselves as first. Rather than have them suppress their talents and put them aside to study for exams, we show them how being smart in their academics supports their personal development and helps them become better at what they are or want to be good at. While they develop their physicality and skills, we train them in becoming better thinkers, analysts, strategists, and storytellers. That way, the exams make sense as they become part and parcel of their overall development rather than as a separate and unrelated obstacle they have to overcome before they are allowed to chase their dreams.

I'm not asking for much to change other than mindset. I want us teachers to recognise that we are supporting the cognitive development of individual people offering a wide variety of talents and abilities, rather than training a common mass of drooling zombies to jump through exam hoops. I want kids to bring their true selves to school and to class -- the ones who know who they are and who they want to be successful as, and not the "student" who only does things because they are told to do things.

A good school isn't the one that goes all-out to deliver the best exam results. It's the one which develops its kids to be whatever they want to be first, then good exam results follow as an after-effect.

Standards and expectations

Thankfully, good sense prevails once again. Old Man Cambridge is still front and centre with his guidelines for grading GP essays. We just have be more specific about our expectations per question and grade accordingly. Ok, I can live with that.

The Graduate

What better way to celebrate the beginning of spring break with a little graduation ceremony? The dog is finally certified 'obedience trained' meaning she can go off-leash in a dog run. As with the driving licence, as my driving instructor told me ages ago, acquiring certification means that the training continues, but without necessitating the supervision of a qualified instructor. Anyway, good girl, Tasha!

And now a group shot with classmates. L-R; Hershey, Tasha, Captain, Daisy, Gigi. Congrats, everyone! And thumbs up to the positive training methods from Pup Pup 'n' Away. A happy, disciplined dog is the best kind to have.

Managing exam stress

Here in S'pore, exam stress is stratospheric. It's evident in the teary eyes that received the graded prelim exam papers from me this morning. It's hard not to feel for them that didn't do well. They have been working themselves hard and are still not getting the results they are hoping for. Stress, according to one student, messes with the mind during the paper and while the question is worded one way, they read it in another. The result is pretty much a foregone conclusion.

I say again, exams are not a bad thing. However the way in which we prepare students to take exams is strategically ineffective. What we have done is to set up the year-end exam as the hardest thing a student will accomplish in the year. All the preparation, training, practice and revision programmes are engineered to give the students the impression that this is it, do or die. They may have been futzing around in the past but this one last hurdle is make-or-break, good luck and I hope to see you on the other side.

Although we believe that this is the way to motivate the kids to make that final push, for the majority of the kids, all we've accomplished is to develop a phobia for the final exam. Hence the stress, paralysis and everything else bad associated with final exams.

The person who can figure out how to make exams less stressful, yet maintain standards of academic rigour could stand to make some serious bucks. That would be me. However, I'll dispense my advice right here... which means no one will ever take it seriously. Regardless, here goes:

Never set the final exam up to be the hardest thing a student will accomplish in the year. Instead, make it the easiest thing they will ever do in your class for the year. If the kids are sitting for H1 GP make them submit undergraduate-level research papers on a regular (though less frequent) basis. Make them write 2000, 2500 word essays, with full and proper citations from the latest, most up-to-date sources. When they're used to that, sitting for H1 GP would be relatively chicken-feed. 500-800 words, argumentative, current affairs-type essay in 90 minutes? A comprehension paper on one or two short opinion pieces? Pffft. I've synthesized more demanding stuff in Mr X's classroom exercises.

If we set the exams up to only test the most rudimentary basics of what we teach in class instead of portraying them as the year-end Monster we make them out to be, no more exam stress. But it will be a new classroom dynamic to manage. I never said it was going to be easy for us teachers to make such a radical paradigm shift.

Getting into the flow with education

The current challenge for schools in staying relevant to our changing times is that instead of locking down information, they should free it up. It seems the memorization by rote thing isn't endemic to the Asian approach to education but a common malady, judging by the rising problems of student engagement and dropout rates everywhere in the world.

Old school functioned by parcelling information out in dribs and drabs according to a prescribed dosage based on the age of the recipient. It categorized information into subjects and topics and kept the disciplines apart from one another, each developing a unique jargon and "accepted" approach so as to discourage cross-contamination between their disparate spheres. It designed exams that rewarded those who accumulated and hoarded information, keeping it to themselves, while declaring those that didn't incompetent and unworthy. Has there ever been a more unnatural environment in which we expected learning to flourish?

Until today, school still generally functions along those lines with the packaging of pre-digested information in textbooks, reading kits, handouts and notes. We teach answers to questions, then test them on the same questions, and award As to those who best reproduce those same answers back to us. The kids themselves can't answer questions they don't already feel they know the answers to, so it's a vicious cycle. And because we spend most of our time 'spotting' questions that are 'most likely' to come out in the finals and teaching the kids to answer only from a specific range of 'safe' questions, we are bored, the kids are bored, and it sucks to be us.

What we have forgotten, or perhaps failed to observe, is that information is more like a stream or river than a block of ice. Schools freeze information and expect the kids to hold on to it. At the next level, the school rewards the kid with another ice cube and so on up the chain. But the kids' hands are hot and ice melts. It's such a frustration to hold on to melting ice with liquid water dripping all over the place, or it's just so cold, hands turn blue and freeze over themselves. Neither is a good outcome for a learning experience, but that's how we still do it.

But information is a stream or a river, constantly flowing, always bringing something interesting and new along with its current. A fish, a leaf, a branch, an insect... every one of us immersed in the river sees different things at different times, approaches and interprets the experience differently, and is enriched by just being where they are, in their spot in the river. And as we learn from our own immediate circle of reach, we're sharing our own experience with others, just as they are sharing theirs with us. So instead of trying to hoard the same frozen piece of water (which is physically impossible, anyway) in the hope of keeping it from others in order to just enrich ourselves, what we learn from sharing is a myriad different perspectives from different aspects of the same river we have immersed ourselves in. And that's a lot more learning than we ever can get from a lump of ice in our hands.

If we want more of our kids to aim for better (and more meaningful) grades, telling them to cut themselves off from the river and just focus on their set texts will be, as usual, counterproductive. They have to get comfortable navigating the currents in the river at this stage, because when they complete their undergraduate studies, that river would have turned into the ocean... and if they have been well-prepared before, they will marvel at the transition. Else, they'll just drown like so many others before them.