Still late. I started the first day of work being
late by twenty four minutes and they say, how you start your year will be how
your year will be. The government’s bundy clock is quite efficient when it
comes to tardiness. I started with twenty four, next day was sixteen minutes,
then eight, the last day of the week I was three minutes close to being on time
but still late. What is quite interesting is that it only takes about three
minutes to go to the office from my place. Yesterday was Monday, I did resolve the day
before that I’ll be on the dot, but eleven minutes waited for me to be late.
Today I woke up forty five minutes earlier than usual, but so much for hoping
and trying, I arrived two minutes late. Quite close but still late. I hope I’ll
arrive on time tomorrow.
Now on to other matters, before our Christmas
vacation in the university, my students took their Midterm exam in advance.
It’s supposed to be on the 18th to 20th of this month but
we were ahead of time with our lectures. I checked the papers during the break
and I am a bit disappointed with the results. I definitely made the exam easier
than the previous ones but it did not show substantial difference compared to
giving difficult exams. The exam was analytical, as expected from the nature of
economics. Some of the questions were too logical but they did not get the
right answer, multiple choice resulting to multiple errors. It is perhaps because my students did not or
they do not really study. I don’t get the idea that they were expecting to pass
without even studying. How is that possible? One of my students was even
skeptical with her score that we had to go over all the test questions to prove
that she deserved what she got. She told me that she studied before the exam and that she does not deserve to fail. I just told her, "Then study harder. That's what you should do for the finals." There is indeed a big difference between knowing and understanding. Mere knowledge would not suffice, it's simply not what you know but how you understand the concepts--this is what education is all about.
Voltaire was right when he said common sense is not so common. It's clearly becoming a "copy and paste" culture. Thinking is almost optional. We are surrounded with ready information we do not have time to digest them. The information we get from television and the internet may keep us updated but may be a reason for us to become lax. It's also a culture of "Like" and "Statuses" when we try to draw the attention of other people. Even a culture of "unfriend" or remove from friend's list and "unlike" which is another term for correcting what has been liked earlier but soon realized that it should not have been liked in the first place. These may be simple actions in the virtual world, but they create a big gap as to how people should communicate. Some of my students do not talk at all but they are quite loud online. They don't talk when they're in the offline world but they are noisy online. So the question perhaps is, how often do you use your brain? If you use it everyday, then that's good. If you have not been using it for more than a week now, do something...think perhaps?
