Because Grades doesn't spell Smartness

Pieces from Edges
By Joel Aba
An Opinion Article
Published for the Golden Eagles
College of Business and Accountancy yearly publication
Negros Oriental State University


Learning: Redefined

Have you ever tried memorizing long sentences with the hope of putting answers to your enumeration-type test? Awful, isn’t it? But it could be much awful when you have finished memorizing everything, yet you have not actually learned what it’s all about.

It could be “utmost awful” if you do it for the sake of getting a grade.

In our university, even in our very own college, we students could have no other way but agree to this. In fact, I have even found myself guilty of such. We sometimes tend to memorize the words, but not it’s real meaning, not even the essence of why such words must be remembered.

But this manner of getting a grade has gone way deeper than just passing a subject. This has, in one way or another, destructively caused us to have a bound-to-be-fleeting knowledge of what the subject matter is all about.

A subject, if we define it, is one included in a curriculum and is not only any of the various courses of study in a school or college, but a body of learning. Learning, in the other hand is the acquisition of knowledge or skill. Therefore, trying to memorize everything discussed without properly understanding its real implication and purpose to us and memorizing merely to get a grade is virtually nonsense – or simply, meaninglessness.

But this truth does not extinguish the value of what memorizing brings us. Memorizing is good, and it is at its best, if and only if, associated with internalizing the facts printed or copied on our notebooks.

Just like how we learned our ABC, we have tried in pre-school memorizing all the 26 letters of the English alphabet. But memorizing alone is not the real essence of why remembering the alphabet is a must. The practice of using them to produce and spur out some phrases that breeds to sentences, to paragraphs, and to speech is the main objective of such memorization – the “real and essential learning.”

And just like going to school, and answering our paper exams, we need to restructure and redefine the process of how we learn – trying to understand what it is all about, which is primarily the golden rule in learning. Questions like, “Why do I have to study this?” and “What learning could I get from this?” or “How will this confuse me and sharpen my mental abilities?” are the right questions in redefining and reassessing our learning process at school.

Our teachers in the College of Business and Accountancy are all armed to instruct us. It is up to us to remember their instructions by heart and mind, and hopefully resuscitate them in the future, not just memorize them and “gone with the wind”.

Only then will we say that the words, “I have truly learned”.