Cheesecake Pressure

One of the biggest splashes on the world news scene is the supposed move toward unification of North and South Korea for the winter Olympics. Don’t worry, this isn’t going to be another rant about Trump or Communism but I’d like to write about a topic my son suggested; cheesecake.

In the world where the Olympics started some 2800 years ago, Ancient Greece was just as much eager to win the latest contest as we are nowadays. You might be surprised to find out, as I was, that the secret to a gold medal lies in cheesecake. This ancient equivalent of drug doping pumped the athlete full of high quantities of energy before the bashed it out with the other Greeks. It seems surprising that such cheating methods should have lasted so long (though technically it wasn’t cheating back then) and yet we have scandal after scandal in the modern world. In 2017 the Russian team was yet again banned due to doping, a country that has had over 1000 athletes caught and 51 Olympic medals stripped.

So why do we actually do this? In my opinion (the beauty of blogging) it is the pressure that the modern world puts upon people, fighting for them to be the best or reach the top. Education forces children towards higher grades, to fight for university placement or to get the better careers. Do we ever consider that a teenager might be happier with a low paid job that makes them the wage they need to live but gives them the time to enjoy life?

My other reasoning is one of the backbones of human history: war. Nowadays we have less warfare to compete over (I think) and instead of being the best on the battlefield we need to be the best in the stadium. War is all about defeating the opposition, having the best troops to be the best country so perhaps this is what drives us into such a frame of mind. Are we so fixated on such a way of thinking that even in modern day society those who rule push for high grades, high standards and high results. Its certainly food for thought.

All in all, I hope one day we can sit back and put our differences aside and create games that don’t involve being the best. Perhaps we can live up to those days when we tell them the lie that we’d like to believe ‘remember, its not winning that matters but its the taking part that counts’.

Either that or we should all sit down peacefully with each other and have a slice of cheesecake.

Applying Application

Fifteen years ago, when I started tutoring, I taught biology.

Five years ago I started to teach less biology and more exam technique.

Nowadays I teach application.

Pressure and stress are places upon the shoulders of students when the militaristic structure of the exam paper assessment technique is laid upon them. If it wasn’t bad enough that they feel the weight from the countdown to the exam, studying every week in order to cram the knowledge into their heads, they will learn that in the end it doesn’t matter. It is exam technique that puts up their grade. And of course there isn’t even the understanding of what went wrong for those who don’t realise the important of examination technique. Some don’t know that they all count; the wording of the question; the layout of an applied question; the marks per question. Why should these be part of a student’s assessment of a topic?

The last two years I’ve had to solely concentrate on application because this are of exams has expanded and expanded. Now a student can know the topics inside out, to the extent of being able to teach a subject, and still only get a C grade. How can that be? We’ve changed our world into such a statistical, bureaucratic machine that pumps out education we are blind to that fact that our system destroys the hearts and minds of those we should encourage to learn.

Application has an important place as it assessing whether a student can use this knowledge in the context of real life and the science that they will come across but should an A-level be made up of so much of it? In my day (man that makes me sound old), the A-level biology was primarily about learning and understanding and yet my generation did pretty well at uni. We turn on today’s pupils because their grades are getting higher. We accuse them of easier exams because the percentage of high marks go up rather than being proud of our children.

And why should it mean exams are easier or kids are more intelligent? With an ever increasing size to our population there is bound to be greater number with higher grades. Our answer? Punish them through stress, blowing their confidence and making them frustrated.

Congratulations education system, you’re destroying the next generation.