In a meeting today, we looked into academic quality indicators in my school and have gotten the ill feeling that there seems to be a deterioration in the performance of some students in their freshman year. I have to admit that the blame falls squarely on us running the school including the teachers. For if the students have not learned, we, teachers, have not taught. Although it has been said that it always takes two to tango, and that this deterioration can also be traced to the family and the students, I would feel better to put more blame on us.
Surely the study habits of our students need to be improved. We accept that fact, considering that the study techniques that they should have learned when they were in the elementary grades and high school were never emphasized enough to develop into good study habits. The environments in the family and in the school were not sufficient to encourage study. They did not have exclusive study areas or rooms that facilitate study in the home (which are usually one-room affairs) and school and extra-curricular activities kept them off their books even in their free times at school.
And now, they seem to have even more distractions than before, conditions that make study very difficult.
It is not that we are not doing anything. We have reserved the first hour (homeroom period) everyday as study time (self-managed time, we call it), with supervision by their class advisers and officers. Forced study time (reminds me of the forced nap time back in Kindergarten). But it is not enough.
We need to start them young. That is, to help guarantee that we get better students out of high school, we will help the high schools graduate better students, perhaps starting from when they are in their elementary grades. We will look at these schools as feeder schools. A sort of NBA Development League. This is not a new strategy. My university alma mater has been doing this for many decades and they have succeeded (I was never in the program myself, but I had classmates who were invited to the program). As these students will have acquired the habit of studying even under adverse circumstances, they should perform better with us.
The good news is that a foreign granting institution can help us see this through if we get to convince them well enough. We also need to invite our friends to help us in this as well.
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