Class, Exams, Paralysis and Wrong Answers: My Thoughts

An Image

Picture this for a moment. You’re in class with the rest of your mates. Your teacher is chalking the board up with the usual stuff, equations, explanations, diagrams, etc. You can hear the scrape of pens around you as the class grows quiet. He stops writing. You look at your notes and think you have a pretty good grasp of things. He asks for a volunteer to work out the question in front of him.

Your eyes dart around — you’re looking for someone brave enough to go up there, even though you believe you could find the answer to the question if you just tried. Yet you aren’t going to. You keep looking. Everyone has their head down. Your hands are shaking now. You know you can do it, but you stay glued to your seat. Why? It might have to do with what happened last time; you say to yourself. What happened last time?

You keep trying to leave your seat as the teacher looks at the class with you, but it seems as if you’re stuck. Your teacher catches your nervous eye. He asks you to come up and solve the answer. You frown as you feel the sweat drip down your arm pit, and the words leave your mouth as it dries up: “I don’t think I understand it well, sir.”

You wonder why you said that. Why it was so easy to say “no” and go against your instincts. You remember last time. And the time before that. And the time before that, too. Every time you go up there and make a mistake, your class punishes you. Laughter, snickering, backseat driving, whispering. Your hands shake and sweat. Your heart is pounding. There it is. Right there. That feeling. When you can’t move your hands anymore as the chalk stays on the exact same spot. When you can’t blink. Or take your eyes off the board as your mind starts to race, looking for an answer you know you can find. But you can’t. Your mind is too focused on not getting it wrong to get it right.

With that memory fresh in your mind, you also let your eyes drop into your textbook and wait for someone else to answer the question. But the only problem is, no one is going up there. Because no one wants to experience what you just remembered.

A “Normal” School Day

I just arrived at the boarding house when I saw a friend (We’ll call him S) walk out of his room. School was the next day. I greeted him and he immediately invited me to an MIT in-person course being taught in school. It was an over the holiday type class, and it was just finishing up. Applied Material Science. He figured I’d be into that sort of stuff. He was right, of course. The class was filled with all types of students from different forms. I recognised a few. They were the students who never took studies as seriously as I did (not in bad way — they just knew they wouldn’t drop dead if they didn’t study one weekend). I assumed they had been here for a while, judging from their tired faces. I greeted them and sat down in the back next to S and class went on.

As the MIT student went on, (yes, the class was being taught by university students) I noticed something rather strange. Whenever she asked a question, the class raised their hands to answer it. Whenever a student got the answer wrong, the class was quick to show him/her how to solve it or understand the concept. There were even active participants within the groups we were assigned to. The environment was completely different from what I was used to (which always had me in fight or flight mode). It was a lot calmer. More relaxed. It felt as if some heavy object had been lifted off my chest in that class.

This was a paid class (around $300 for the whole thing). Naturally, I left as soon as I heard that. S didn’t tell me I had to pay to get in… But the experience stuck with me. I’ve mentioned this before, but the class I’m in as of writing this article is full of the number ones and twos of the country. A group whose identity is completely “the smart kids”. The environment I described above in “An Image” is more or less what goes on in class.

I asked myself as I walked back to the boarding house, “How come that class felt so different? So much freer? So much more open to mistakes? And why did it feel so good?”

The Education System

“Punish mistakes and originality and reward systemic perfection”. A line that came to my mind as I spoke with a few of my friends about the education system of today. I wondered if that’s how we’re supposed to learn. I remembered when I was a kid, trying to ride my bike. I fell and fell and fell but I didn’t let me give up. I encouraged myself until I eventually made it across the yard without falling down. I compared that experience of learning to what I felt in class. They were completely different. With my bike, I felt I had the room to make mistakes and learn from them. In class, I felt I had no room for mistakes, and the systems set in place would make sure I didn’t make any: graded tests, final exams and rankings.

Admittedly, I always took these as just stepping stones to see where I should improve and adapt and learn other ways to get to the right answer. But as of resent, that hadn’t been happening. It had been a constant cycle of tests and regurgitating model answers until I got the frame right. It didn’t feel like I was actually learning anything. I fell out of touch with my studies for a while (I also mentioned this in one of my previous blog posts). I hated the very idea of tests and exams.

I concluded it had to do with how the system makes us think of our mistakes. Rankings, grades, etc. How those systems rewarded those who understood what the board wanted them to know and disregarded those who either didn’t understand or wished to solve the problem another way. A way not in the board notes or textbooks, but what still correct according to the natural laws of the universe. Take chemistry or mathematics for example.

It occurred to me that bad grades usually propagate bad grades within the average student.

An idea talked about in “The Winner Effect” by Ian H. Robertson.

“Winning boosts the secretion of testosterone and suppresses stress hormones like cortisol. This increases confidence and risk-taking, and it changes the biochemical makeup of pheromones, even making the winners smell intimidating. Losing has the opposite endocrine effects.” Ian H. Robertson.

Revelation

Then it came to me. The grading system and how we are treated in class acts the same as “winning” and “losing”. The more questions we get wrong (and are berated for it), the less likely we are to try to answer. The worse grades get, the less likely we are to try.

This fear of being mocked, or getting bad grades, or looking stupid, of losing, is what kept me or my classmates from answering that question my physics teacher asked. Yes, that whole image was a real event.

Of course, all of this has to do with the environment you learn in. I did mention that above in vivid detail. But the negative environment I also mentioned happens to be the mental state of a lot of students. They believe if they do not try, they will not fail. Hence, they will not lose.

Little do they know, that path of thinking is what will keep them losing. It’s never a good idea to not try — ever. Nothing good ever comes of that. Especially in school.

After understanding what held me back in class, I decided to look at it from an objective point of view:

I am scared of answering questions or raising my hand or attempting questions without some sort of aid.

Why?

Because I am scared of getting it wrong.

Why?

Because I will be punished for it through mockery and bad grades.

Do you want to get rid of this anxiety?

Yes.

What are you going to do?

I sat on that part for a few days and eventually looked up a few videos & articles on the matter. Here’s what I think one should do to fix this issue.

1. Fix the Internal

I had to understand what was going on inside my mental space. I needed to remind myself why school exists. For learning. For education, not getting all the questions right.

I needed to remind myself of how I used to see mistakes before I joined a class almost as paralysed as me: they are just stepping stones to a greater understanding of what I chose to learn.

It doesn’t matter what the grades are, what the rankings are, what others say. All that matters is my own improvement and process towards my long-term goal. As long as I saw progress and growth, I would be fine.

2. Better Environment

I don’t enjoy talking ill of others, but I did notice the difference between a class full of the “smart kids” (who are often raised to think their self-worth comes from just good grades, further adding into their paralysis) and a normal class, full of people simply interested in what they were doing. The “normal class” was a lot more open and accepting to mistakes and growth. They didn’t expect perfection.

If you find yourself suffering from an issue such as this, it would be a good idea to look for a study group (preferably of people smarter than you) who understand that mistakes are a part of learning and are more than open to you making a few as they help you along the way. An environment that demands perfection is anything but healthy. It goes against human nature — seeing as none of us are perfect.

3. Understand that grades aren’t a reflection of your Potential.

They aren’t. All they are, is a reflection of how well you understand what is being taught to you at that very moment. You may just need a second go at learning the material or a bit more time than everyone else. And that’s fine. As long as you hit the academic goal you set for yourself within the given time frame, nothing else really matters (I want to discuss goal setting later on, but for now, you can try the S.M.A.R.T.E.R. goal setting model).

I understood all this after spending one morning thinking about why I was in school — why I was up at 2200H at night solving questions and running through research papers. I wasn’t here to get everything on a piece of paper correct. I was here to learn everything that was offered to me. Key word, learn.