Sometimes, the slow and steady does win the race.
A student of mine came to my office this morning to discuss some issues about the course. He was about to make a presentation in tutorials tomorrow, so he had some questions about the readings and wanted some clarification.
With the way I had set up the course, there would be student presentations each week. This particular student chose to go first (normally, students never want to go first) and he also decided that he would choose the first essay topic and finish it as soon as he possibly could. That way, he would be done with everything and in his mind, sit back and relax for the rest of the term without having to worry about the course work.
So he thinks.
Well, not that I would give him additional work. Of course not.
But I did ask him this: "What's the rush? Why are you trying to get everything done early? It hasn't even been a month yet since the course started and you've only learned 1 topic out of 13 topics. How do you know you want to do your essay on this topic? Maybe you will find the later topics a lot easier once you've had more time to digest the course material?"
He didn't reply directly to my questions of course....but I knew he got my point. That smirk on his face subsided a little and that crack in his head, maybe, just maybe, widened up just a teennnnyy bit more than before.
No matter, that was the lesson I learned from him today. If you focus too narrowly on something, you may end up missing the whole picture. In his case, I hope he won't have to learn the lesson the hard way.
No comments:
Post a Comment