Who knew?

Two Wednesdays ago, my parents took my brother and me to the Indian Science and Technology Fair and I was pleasantly surprised. It wasn’t at all what I expected it to be. I mean, whoever expects to spend an afternoon gushing over science and exclaiming over their physics textbook coming alive!? Not me. I usually moan about being ‘sick and tired’ of hearing how great Newton was. The fellow was like ‘pot salt’ – he poked his nose in every branch of physics! But, the exhibition was really cool. No matter how many YouTube videos you check up to get a visual idea of the things your textbook struggles to describe, nothing beats seeing them in real, actual 3D.
So, now I guess I’ll grudgingly admit to my dad, ‘Yes dad, Physics actually might be pretty cool.’ And in addition to giving me a new perspective on my arch-enemy aka physics, I learnt a lot about India, and all the discoveries they made so many thousands of years ago, when the West was still in caves hitting each other over on the head with clubs.
It made me realise, how much more meaningful the things we learn in our boring old black and white textbooks, actually are when you see them in real life; when you see that hey, they’re actually used in real life! Too many times, we students separate schoolwork from real life, expecting that the things we learn in school will only show up on exam papers, never quite believing that they might actually be a part of everyday life.
But moving up through school, the things we learn are incremental. If we learn a little more about photosynthesis, for instance, we learn a little more about the world we live in – about how wondrous and coordinated are the processes that make up ‘life’. We value our existence even more.
Somewhere, in the back of our mind, we always suspect that school was invented as a place of torture, designed to trap us for most of our youthful lives, until we’re done and ready to be trapped in a job.
And, well, that doesn’t exactly help with the whole studying process, does it? So maybe here in Guyana, we need to adopt more visual and interactive methods of teaching. We need to make the subject more meaningful to students.
And in addition to teaching methods becoming more visual, students themselves have to become more curious, more excited about learning new things.
I know, that sounds a bit corny, almost as corny as naming a website ‘Maths is Fun’ (sorry, but by naming the website that, you pretty much turn off and alienate most students who are suffering through integral calculus), but really, if we have to learn these things in any case, why not try to actually see its relevance to our lives? It’ll at least make the suffering a bit more tolerable.
Because yes: you can probably be a good doctor, a good surgeon, a good engineer, but if you don’t enjoy what you’re doing, if you’re not passionate about whatever you do, you’ll just be going through the motions.
Everything will be dry and textbook-like, and you while you’ll be a good student, you won’t be that great student who goes the extra mile and achieves whatever they want, and more.
Maybe the government can ask that the exhibition remain in Guyana?