Energy Drainers

What's draining our energy?

Attended a luncheon seminar about teaching and learning today and got a few reflections. Though some of it may not directly relate to the topic that covered, a few enlightened thoughts did worth remembering.

This kind of seminar is usually attended by faculty members who are interested in the topic (except a few those interested more in the light refreshment provided). When I got into the room, it was fully crowded with students! I heard the students behind me murmured “… … … sandwiches…..… Seven-eleven… at least costs HK$10”. Wow, people really attend workshop with different motives. Saw a familiar student whom I don’t know he is also interested in the topic. They are ‘encouraged’ to come by their teacher or else two marks will be deducted, he told me. Interesting.

Later on, we had group discussion. Our group has seven people – 3 of them are teachers and 4 are students from different programs. At the beginning, students are enthusiastic on the discussion – they expressed their frustrations on how some courses are boring, not useful and not practical based on the topic of “Course Design and Assessment”. Basically, there’s any problem for the conversation to keep on except no one seems to realize the key question shown in the Power point slide is “What we have to do so as to make the ‘learning’ more likely?”. Honestly, I had a different view with the group but as the person summarizing the key concepts and shared with the reminding audience, I chose to express views from the students’ perspectives. One member mentioned that he would like to have more practical knowledge instead of learning the theories and concepts. Also, he would like the Professors pay more concerns on student’s group work. For example, they should check with the students for their progress of work from time to time. The other member mentioned that rather than doing papers and presentations, he hoped to have some games or competition be introduced into the course assessment. While there’s one agreed that we should strive a balance between learning on theories and applications. The first member, sitting next to me, seems not very satisfied with his studies – he would like to have more instructions, more monitoring during the group project etc. While I drop the reflective thoughts on my notebook, I can’t stop thinking : we had so a divergent view on the conceptions of learning. Just within 15 minutes, I had witnessed how the effect of rote learning influenced students in their previous 15 years of studies.

This particular student did have lots of ideas and he tried to talk to me/the other group members while other groups were doing their sharing. Being a bit annoyed by his murmuring ideas, a thought flashed in my mind. There’s really some energy drainers exist in our life which we shouldn’t be neglected of. At times, there will be opinion like “how everyone out there in the world should change in order to make myself a better life.” Rather than putting more energy in these kinds of paradoxical suggestions, shouldn’t we better stop and save the energy for some other work?