I think at it's core, there's a huge contrast in personality that creates a lot of friction between me and a lot of other, shall we call them type X, personalities. I think the same would be true if I hung out with a lot of slackers as well, as evident in army. By that understanding, it can't be the fault of "other people". There's only so many times you can shift the blame to other people before realizing the problem is with yourself. I'm okay with that. It's a part of life that I have to accept, like luck.
The idea that "work = results", and by extension "more work = more results" is so universal and ingrained into our psyche that nobody takes any disputes to this seriously. Certainly, no education system would. Interestingly, anyone who has witnessed any results presentation (A or O levels results) would say that hard work is not enough. We've seen enough tears to know otherwise. "Smart work is the way to go" people will say. Well, of course smart work is the way to go, but we haven't quite nailed down what smart work means.
I often wonder how much of my grades are affected by anything other than what I already know or how much work is put in. It's interesting to think that if we put a sufficiently large sample size of monkeys or chimps and have them do MCQs, would we get a significant result. What about the teachers' mood when he is marking or your handwriting, especially when it comes to open-ended answers.
From the perspective of someone who never does homework on a regular basis, it makes it a bit hypocritical to suddenly place so much value on it. Most teachers have a belief that work should be given to students every time there's a break of more than 1 day between lessons and because my subject demands kids to know how to write, naturally they get them to write. Looking at this logically, it makes sense, like how a person who sucks at standing broad jump should simply do more standing broad jumps. Yet nobody gets to the gold standard doing only standing broad jumps, even if they do it for 1000 times a day. It helps you get out of a certain standard or band, but after which, it depends on a multitude of other factors, which can be trained by other exercises.
There is no one-size-fits-all answer for this. Learning is different for everyone and continuous writing does not always translate into results. What's smart for me may not be smart for you and vice versa.
I also happen to be of the opinion that JC students should be able to take learning into their own hands. I guess that's why I stopped making anything compulsory except for the very very weak. My personal style is that I prefer my better students to teach my weaker ones because that was how I learnt. Teaching or mentoring was in some sense a game-changer because as an above-average (for GP) student, it provides a sense of responsibility and shifts the focus from yourself to the weaker pupil. It also exposes a lot of gaps you never knew you had in education.
Ultimately, what students need is a level of self-awareness and self-critical(ness) that allows them to see what is working and what isn't.
Because of what I believe, it's quite obvious why I seem to have less work than my fellow co-workers. I do spend a ridiculous amount of time just staring at my lesson plan and waiting for an idea to pop up.
Haven't written something like this in a long time.
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