complain: too much holidays

There’s something wrong, wrong, wrong about school. As our very much revered TPH rightly puts it, “这个学期有十个星期，你说上几个星期的课?” Although that was a rhetorical question, he answered it anyway, “我看有足足有三个星期放假！” (exasperated wry smiles). It’s a nail on the head, though. School’s so “in and out”, brief and not at all intense, like a stuttering engine which would extend its insistence and existence way past the start of our traditional holidays. School-going is no longer a continuous, flowing process of learning, or rote-learning, or spoon-feeding, it’s highly interrupted, slack and almost non-existent.

The very purpose of school lessons, I feel, is to teach us societal conventions and conventional information in as quick a way as possible. So it’s chop chop information cramming in school, and after you’re left at home at your own devises. There you can engage yourselves in independent, critical thinking, read out of curriculum, explore the world… do whatever your heart tells you to!

But now they’re placing so much holidays in between that there’re no lessons—then where to get the teaching and learning done? Do it myself? A good solution… precisely what I’m doing now. But I want to be able to do whatever I like, so either I don’t care much about the tested topics or I care about them and try to get all the information I require. Let’s say I’m a good boy and commit to the latter, the next question to ask is: what do I look through? Which fact do I concentrate on and mull over? Which one do I just take at face value and gloss over? Unless you’re a genius (which I’m not), we would want structured lessons that tell us all these so that we’re not that tied down to exams, and can do whatever we want easier.

Perhaps I’m being too reliant on spoon-feeding, rote-learning. Or perhaps I assume that lessons are in fact very useful. I’m assuming wrongly, lessons aren’t useful. Many teachers don’t teach properly, they don’t give enough information, they don’t explain and enlighten. Nowadays there’re “peer-teaching”, “discussions” (useless unless it’s lit), creative and “thought-provoking” videos and slides which seem educational but never convey new insights or information. Lessons aren’t that spoon-feeding anymore too.

I’m ranting. It shouldn’t matter whether there’s teaching, there’re lessons or lack thereof. I just have to accept things and move on.