When I was in high school, we were trained for a math competition. We were taught how to graph, and my teacher gave us a list of points that we had to locate and label. We were doing this for some time, but after a while, I had to stop and ask my teacher, “Why do we need to learn this? It’s just dotting points on paper.” She gave a short answer, basically telling me that we need to learn it in case we were asked to graph something. I wasn’t really satisfied with the response, and I was less than excited about graphing.
In school, we are taught to memorize a lot of facts and solve problems. For most students, their motivation for learning is grades. Why do you need to make a fifty-page paper on Pearl Harbor? Because if you don’t, you won’t get the grades, and you won’t graduate. This is a good source of motivation, but I believe there’s a better one—we learn in order to apply what we’ve learned to real-life problems. To do this, we need to first appreciate the material.
I think it’s important to discuss why we have to learn a certain topic before going into the technicalities. I hate it when teachers immediately delve into the equations without telling us what problems these clump of numbers and letters could potentially solve and what they could do for us someday. We were trained to just accept and learn stuff without appreciating their value. I don’t know about you, but I find it easier to study for something that I know will be useful to me someday. If you were given a weird-looking vase for your birthday, you might not appreciate it that much. But after doing a quick internet search and finding out that the vase was designed by some famous person and costs more than a month’s salary, I’m sure you’d display it proudly and talk about it when guests arrive. That’s because you now know its value. If you think about it, everything else follows the same principle. We appreciate people and things more if we know what they’re worth to us. We tend to give them more attention.
When we learn something new, especially something difficult, it would seem easier, or at least we will be more motivated to study it, if we know it’s important that we do so.
For example, I read every day not because I like running my eyes through the pages but because I know that reading enriches you as a person and that the written word is powerful enough to cause revolutions or incite rebellions. I know it’s important, so it’s not hard for me to do it. Some people think learning about history is boring, but I find it fascinating because I know that it’s a record of what humans have done in the past, what mistakes they made, and what things worked and didn’t work for them. This could be used as a reference to us in present times, to do what produces desirable results and to avoid the mistakes of our ancestors.
Learning can be tedious when you don’t like a lesson and you feel like you’re forced to learn new information just to get the grades. But it will be a different scene when you know the importance of what you’re studying and what it can do for you once you’ve mastered it. So the next time you’re dealing with a new topic in school, do your research first and learn why you need to study it. A person is more motivated to dig if he knows there’s gold ahead than when he’s merely told to just dig.
It's a Ping Thing 