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19 May 2003
I'm doing some revision tutorials for students at the moment, with finals looming next week. The look of panic on their faces makes me feel empathetically nervous. They hold themselves as if they fear moving too quickly, in case knowledge spills out of their brains like water from a carelessly held glass. I vividly remember that feeling. During my finals, I stopped watching factual programmes on TV to prevent vital information about mating systems in birds being displaced by the date of the Battle of Bosworth, or the properties of quarks.
One really nice thing about doing revision tutorials—if you can weather the waves of panic—is that you can make a tangible difference. For better or worse, the material often only starts to come together during revision. Students are often struggling to see how a and b fit together, and with a few simple explanations you can give them an overview. The almost visible lightbulbs that appear over their heads at these moments make it all worthwhile.
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Jo: I do know what you mean - I felt much the same way, though it was a bit of a love-hate thing.
jb: Panic has a smell too. Even if you were blind, you would know when exams were coming up or project deadlines looming by the smell in the undergraduate computer lab. Yuk.
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I think that when we learn we need to have breaks for stuff to "ooze into our brains" - and these breaks sometimes need to be for weeks or even months. I imagine that the pre-exam sessions help consolidate and strengthen what your students already know, of course, but have hidden so far away in the darkest recesses of their minds that they possibly wouldn't otherwise be able to access it all. Yes, it's very satisfying when you notice that at last your students have "got it" - that's a wonderful feeling. It's part of what makes it all worthwhile, right?
by David (TEFL Smiler) @ 23/05/2003 1:05 am • Permalink •
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I had a few of those moments in my revision tutorials where a topic that had completely passed me by the first time round suddenly made perfect sense. I oddly enjoyed my finals term. I worked really hard doing past papers and stuff so that by the end of each week I would feel wired - high on Maths. I used to force Alex (who'd been a year ahead of me) to take me out to dinner once a week to distract me, although I'd always end up telling him my plans for which questions from the a5 paper I was going to answer or something. Happy days.----- Panic oozes out of the corridors of my dpt. Partly from students revising, but also colleagues who've got to hand in marking!
by jb @ 20/05/2003 6:05 pm • Permalink •