Smart Student. Smart School.

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Smart students are the thing now, and with the way the world is going, going back to the era of hardworking students will be difficult. This is a period where many students are interested in making money and not willing to sit back and wait for their parents to provide it. Even though the school system is tight and doesn’t provide much leeway for them, students will still find a way to be industrious.

That’s the way of the world now. Students take on jobs, just as their academic pursuits are stressful, the jobs they take on are equally stressful! And this can lead to one part of their lives taking dominance over the other. It’s sad, but then, it is what it is.

Sadly though, all this isn’t just for work and all. There are students who are simply not all that interested in the learning process. They’d just about do anything they could to pass their exams. They spend their days doing nothing and having the time of their lives, then they end up trying to cheat their way through exams.

And then, in this day and age where the internet is easily accessible to everyone, exam malpractice is so easy. Thanks to ChatGPT and the like, people can get answers to questions at the snap of a finger. The answers can be so detailed that even the lecturer would never have guessed such an answer. Students of this age are getting smarter at cheating the system, and it’s up to the system to outwit them.

The other day, I was walking past a school and I heard one of the classes reciting the multiplication timetable and the 36 states and capitals in Nigeria. I was shocked that such a practice was still going on. It was something that was done during my day in primary school and it’s still being done today. And I have to tell you, none of that information has helped me. Since the day I started learning the states and capitals until this very moment, no one has asked me to recite it.

The same goes for multiplication tables. It’s so not important today. We have calculators that can do that. We have phones that can do that. If you suddenly want to multiply 765 by 34, your first instinct would not be to do it in your head. Instead, you’d run it on your phone. That’s the smart way, doing it in your head is the hard way. These are things that are designed to make our lives easier and students are already utilizing it. However, for some reason, the school system remains backward!

Do you believe that some lecturers still mark scripts with the same marking scheme from the 90s? Some lecturers still believe that their own definition of certain terms is the only acceptable definition out there and as such, if you give something different, even though it’s correct, then you’re failing that course. This is not what we need, the school system needs to do better. Instead of fighting the changes that are already taking over, they can embrace it and make it their own.

I had a lecturer who always made her tests open book. Open Book means that you’re allowed to use textbooks and phones to write the tests. However, no matter what you browse or how much ChatGPT helps you, "You no know am be say you no know am!!!” She sets her questions in a way that makes them personal and you really need an in-depth knowledge of the topic before you can give a correct answer.

Sadly, this is the only woman far beyond her peers. I just feel that the system is lazy and unwilling to make the necessary changes. I’m sure they can make policies that will make malpractice impossible. Adjust to current trends so that even though the students come into the hall with phones and are browsing, it won’t make any difference! That will be a true test of intelligence because what we practice now is only a test of memory. How much you can remember of the things that you were taught?

We really need an upgrade. We don’t need to know all the states and capital in the country, a simple Google search can give us that. However, we do need lessons to know how tribal and religious differences can be fixed. We don’t need to cram multiplication and logarithm tables in our heads, but we need to know just how we can use these numbers to make our everyday living a bit easier. It shouldn’t always be about finding the value of X, it can also have to do with financial education, social media utilization and what have you…

There is so much that can be achieved once the system stops fighting change. It makes life easier and maybe the students will be forced to learn for real once they know that even the internet and their sophisticated phones can’t help them. Maybe when we finally get there, we’ll see the change we’re looking for. But until then, I guess we’d just have to make do.

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_{Thank you for reading. Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below, I would love to know what you’re thinking. Till we meet in the next post.}

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_{This post is inspired by the first topic of this week which is A Smart Student. Feel free to try it out.}

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_{N.B: All images used in this post are mine. The thumbnail was designed using Canva.}

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