Repetitive School

Are you tiered of doing the same thing over and over again in school? Repetition can be useful for learning something very well in school. It also helps students that don’t understand the first time by giving them another chance. But do we really need multiple pages with questions one to fifty on the same thing, with only slight variations? Don’t you think that it would be more useful if students learned a variety of different skills instead of just one or two very, very, very well? We end up doing basic skills as a review for the first part of the next year in any case.

I think that student should be taught the main lesson once, and then only given one page of work (not with millions of questions crammed into every corner of the page) to do. The teacher would then collect the work and mark it, and if on average everyone did well, then the teacher would give another lesson. If most of the class did well, but some didn’t, then the teacher would explain more thoroughly and give the people who didn’t do well some homework. And of course if no one in the class did well, then the teacher would do the same with the whole class as he or she would do if only a part of the class did not do so well. The class would progress much faster, and they could afford to spend time on other types of activities.

 Being overly repetitive can also do damage. If you do the same basic skills over and over, you could lead yourself to believe that you won’t like the next step up from that base. Then when you get to and interesting part, it’s already ruined for you because you anticipate that you won’t enjoy it. And when you don’t enjoy something, you tend do be worse at it. So while it may be easier to just do the same things over and over again, it’s just not the right path to choose.