As high school students, our schoolwork has invaded our personal and social lives. The presence of this invasion has come at the sacrifice of our own time, and when we realize how much schoolwork crawls into every corner of our lives, we take a step back. When armed with so little capacity to dwell and reflect on our personal lives, schoolwork can sometimes condition itself to be at the bottom of our brain hierarchy, and that’s where busy work comes in. Busy work, as many students define it, are assignments that have no intentional purpose of strengthening a student’s skillset; the sole purpose is to keep students occupied.
Within those gaps where teachers need to keep students busy, a topic should be applied in a more useful way. A topic that explores common interests among students (whether that be funny stories or puzzles). Education should be a playground, where students can explore different assets and learn about them within their current level.
Education shouldn’t be tedious—it should be memorable. Memorable meaning, students beginning to value the significance of what they see in the classroom in order to use it outside. The more we connect common interests we come to further our use of education. Sarting to value our education takes three steps: Learning the basics, expanding our creativity while delving into the topic more, and letting students personalize what they learned, catering it to their unique interests and talents.
Personalized education is an effective asset in making focus in the classroom a more meaningful place.; Of course, problems arise because every student has to be approached as individuals.When I think of personalized education, I think of seminars and discussions because each of our brains interpret information individually. There is a great benefit to this—finding interest in a topic if and when we can mold it to fit with our own interpretations and also learning from other people’s interpretations. Discussions and seminars are not completely reliant on memorizing material, as they challenge our brains to apply the topic to other situations—like how in a history class discussing the potential detriments of combining church and state made me think of a current social crisis in Afghanistan, which was not only a preview to the topic about theocracies in the common era but a thought that connected past theocracies to current social crisis’.
Let’s be real, if you gave a teenager a 100-item practice assignment to learn about a topic, you’ll find them snoring after 5 minutes. But when you allow the teen to use their creativity while learning, they’re way more likely to stay engaged and actually see the information as valuable. That could mean watching a cartoon, playing a game related to the topic, or just finding creative ways to connect with the material. This all just reminds me of a time—a time where my psychology teacher gave a funny story about her dogs in relation to operant conditioning; which took a huge chunk of our time, but all the students were suddenly so amazed by the story, they started sharing their own stories in relation to operant conditioning. And nearly just like that, a topic I learned in psychology felt like more than an assignment grade.
A Junior student I interviewed, who has experienced a rigorous academic environment, presents a testament to their opinion on busy work, explaining that busy work rarely occurs in more rigorous classes such as dual enrollment or AP. There, they describe the classwork and homework as intentional to cultivating better writing skills and practice. Whether students are challenged with a course more rigorous, students inevitably aren’t going to apply US History or Geometry as effectively if they never cared to put effort in the work. And it is true in some cases, learning about such subjects will inevitably become forgotten. But, we must always see the real world as an outlet for what we learn in the education system and the levels of application that derives from work is an element to really building a student up to be knowledgeable. Because turning education into an experience, rather than a completion folder is important in making education more applicable to success and knowledge in the real-world.