Up to this point in our lives I think that most of us can tell that we have gone through a million and one exams. Oral or written exams, they both make us think of a variety of things. How am I going to handle all this information? Will my brain remember all of this? What is the best strategy to remember and to learn this topic?
Since we were little kids in primary school
we all have been through different studying techniques, we don’t use the same ones and it also depends on the subject or topic that you have to study for. Teachers at school try to teach you how to study, but to my mind there is no universal recipe. Eventually as we grow up and start to understand “the studying situation” we will develop different techniques on our own. We as teachers can also try to help our students to find a way in which they will remember more things, but all this is only advice. They will develop a technique of their own. Trial and error. You will eventually find out what works out best for you.
Regarding the proper situation of sitting for an exam, I’ve been through different stages along my life, it hasn’t been the same. As a young student I had the pressure of my family to pass all my exams, I never had to sit for an exam in December, best student, carrying the flag by the end of the year. But as I grew up, and started college, I realized that getting good grades is not everything that matters. You can get a ten because you know the questions that are going to be asked, or you got lucky and the teacher assessed you on the only topic you’ve studied, or you just studied a lot. So there are a lot of things that influence your grades. Getting tens doesn’t make a better person o student. A good student is someone who is responsible, tidy, manages to get always on time to a lesson, doesn’t interrupt, helps her/his classmates, etc.
So I try to show my students all of these factors, if you are a ten, good for you! But the other things matter too. I love when they do and outstanding work and they are very happy for it because they have worked a lot. That’s a good student. Not the one who got a ten just because he sat half an hour and managed to finish something just to get away with it.
Another thing that we have to take into account with our students, which I don’t why at a superior level isn’t taken into account, is that different ways in which they need to be assessed. Some have to be assessed preferably by an oral exam, others written, some others can just be assessed by multiple choice activities and so on and so forth. At college level this isn’t taken into account, as we are all adults, it is taken for granted that a traditional written or traditional oral exam is enough. If nowadays we are enforcing the subject of multiple intelligences at school level, why this isn’t guaranteed at superior level? We are raising students to a kind of pedagogy that won’t be available for them when they finish school.
As I started reading, I couldn't stop. We bought the book.That night I arrived home and read it until I fell asleep. The following day at school I didn´t pay attention in class because I was reading the book. By the second day I had already finished reading "Vagabundeando en el eje del mal". The trip that Juan Pablo Villarino describes in that book is something new, a trip though the middle east, the land which everyone is afraid of. He writes in such a capturing way that you can't stop reading.
