Let’s give a hand to the spirit of Peter Davis’s
commentary “How to Break
Out of the Cycle of Preparation.” Yet would we really dare to
not write the ten page essay due this week in IBH History? I
doubt it.
Grades are a gigantic concern
for high school students, especially those striving to fulfill
the IB curriculum.
Some people are able to have the liberated mindset that “I’m going
to school for knowledge, not for grades.” However, such assertive
statements are rare. I understand that the importance of grades
has been misunderstood by many high school students, including
myself! Perhaps we should consider the concept of grades
in a more optimistic light. The usefulness and purpose of grades
should not be rejected simply because students may view them to
be nothing more than added pressure. Colleges ask for grades because
they are a brief summary of our high school lives. They
are evidence of what we attempted to do and how much effort we
put into the work. Without university admission staff using grades
as evidence and measurement, how will kids end up in the colleges
that best fit them?
Although we may be willing to break out, the path
to do so is not always so clear. If
we lose interest and connection with the disciplines that we study,
problems will inevitably arise and we will never make any progress.
We may be motivated today to thoroughly consider the best method
to deal with related rates problems, but tomorrow, when another
chapter to read for English, another lab to write for Chemistry,
and another basketball game to attend fill up
space in our agendas, we won’t want to revisit the Calculus notes
we took yesterday. This is where grades come in. Grades
represent the contract by which we bind ourselves to do our assignments. To avoid receiving an “F” on our record, we
feel that we’d better finish the work tonight.
One of
my favorite rules about life is pretty similar to the ideology
of the “Cycle of Preparation,” but
I consider it to be more like a domino principle. It’s part
of the beauty of nature: the past always leaves us precious privileges
that function as the base to reach farther and higher in the
present. We are really lucky to undergo these thirteen years
of preparation. Just
consider not having the opportunity to prepare. Wouldn’t that be
disastrous? Preparation is an important step in the process and
is crucial to success. We enter school not even knowing what the
alphabet is, yet thanks to the arduous preparation we’ve endured,
we leave with the ability to create masterpieces. Preparation pays
off.
Compared with Asia’s
educational system, the approach in the United
States strongly stresses real-world
applications. In American textbooks, the introductions at the beginning
of each chapter contain relatively helpful connections with the
practical world, while Asian math textbooks, with numbers and more
numbers, rarely look attractive and hardly go beyond two hundred
pages. With eye-catching
arrangements and sufficient explanations, the textbooks do everything
they should to please and teach students at the same time.
I applaud “How
to Break Out of the Cycle of Preparation” because it echoes
the spirit of young people who make serious efforts to transform
this flawed world. However, transforming this cycle requires
a great deal of thought and consideration. And,
if we ever do “break out,” we should always preserve this principle
of deliberation so that we do not make changes that we will later
regret.
