The winners and those left behind
For the six and a half years that I have thus far been in graduate school I have taught and tutored a number of topics within the fields of science and mathematics. Over this time period, I have naturally observed trends in the students that pass through. These trends point not to a decline in what people know, but a change in how people think and approach learning.
In every class, you are going to have students that quickly pick up the material and people who struggle a bit more. The former students typically gain an ego boost and the latter often get down on themselves. In essence, we have a group of people who, though the feedback that is provided by the instructors, begin to perceive themselves as “winners” or “left behind.” While in moderation these mentalities aren’t of much concern. The winners get a confidence boost that will facilitate further success in their studies. The ones who didn’t as well are given a clue as to material that they might want to examine again to facilitate future success. What is concerning are when people go to the extremes. Even worse, it seems that as time goes on a greater percentage of the students that come through the classroom fall to the extremes.
The first group, the “winners,” have let their success go to their head. Their ego has become inflated sometimes to the point where they believe that they can do no wrong. Any degree of questioning is frequently met on the defensive. After all, such questioning has the potential to destabilize their altar of the Ego. In some cases we observe a complete lack of desire to learn because the student believes that they already know everything they need to know. That there is an end goal in what they can learn within the given field and that they have reached it. I have known employers who refused to hire the straight A students as there tends to be a trend that such students are unreceptive to learning new skills and are stuck in their own ways of doing things. They are incapable of unlearning in order to improve.
The second group, the “left behind,” perceive themselves as losers. These students are the ones who feel that no matter what they do that they will never be good enough. The system has beat down on them to the point where they are convinced that they are not smart. With this comes a decrease in overall curiosity. They become so absorbed with trying to figure out a quick and easy solution to provide the answer the teacher wants to see that they fail to see the underlying elegance to what they are actually doing. They don’t want to know what is going on but rather be given a “recipe” to how to solve certain problem types. Oftentimes when the student gets a question wrong, instead of looking at their work and trying to figure out what went awry, the student will simply start writing down various answers in hopes that they might by chance come upon the correct one.
So as time goes on, we see an increasing number of students becoming self-absorbed or defeated by the system. The lab I teach is essentially a series of dissections to observe features of vertebrate evolution. One trend that is consistent with both of these extreme groups is the fact that they essentially don’t want to be there and are only there because they have to for the university credits. Neither group actually completes the dissection and will leave the lab early, the first feeling it’s just a waste of their time and the later feeling that no matter what they will never understand. This increasing trend over time has disheartened me as animals were killed in the interest of helping the students understand. To short-change the dissection of the animal is just an unnecessary loss of life.
So what can be done to solve these problems? Undoubtedly by this point some of the readers will have thought “But Rax, everyone learns differently.” This is of course true, but the individualized one-on-one help that this dissection lab advertises as well as tutoring outside of the lab should in theory help to accommodate different learning styles. Basically the problem I see doesn’t stem from the amount of information the student knows coming into the lab (in fact, we work with the assumption that they have never seen these animals and have no clue as to their anatomy and physiology) nor does it come from variability in resources available. What I see as the problem is the philosophy of the student. Namely, there is a distinct lack of questioning. Perhaps it’s because they actually don’t care about the material, perhaps it’s because they are afraid to ask a question, perhaps it’s because they are stuck in either their ego-centric or defeated state of mind. So from an early stage I try to encourage students to think and question what they are looking at. To think critically about what they think they know and assess the potential for things they don’t know. After all, these students are likely to do research at some stage, and knowing what you don’t know is sometimes just as important as knowing what you know. And in light of this introduction to research, it becomes important to note that learning has no ending. There are tons of people who are doing research every day to expand our knowledge base and aid in continued learning and understanding. By limiting our learning potential by thinking we know everything is treason unto oneself. By accepting defeat before even trying to understand is failing to live to your potential. Never trying means that one never has a chance to change, a chance to grow. But by questioning that we draw people away from the extremes back towards the middle, the balance between knowing and not knowing, where greatest amount of personal growth is observed. It is through questioning that we learn, it is through learning that we understand, it is through understanding that we can gain an appreciation for how beautifully elegant the world around us truly is.
