Students across world tend
to descend upon libraries and reading rooms a few weeks to examinations in a
bid to catch up. In most of the universities I attended there is a special
fortnight in which the library operates 24 hours. This is usually to allow
students more time to use resources they might need to prepare for
examinations.
Why do students always get
into a reading frenzy only weeks to examinations? I will try to examine one possible
view. It is the failure to translate an objective meaning of time into adequate
preparation for everyday school tasks and examinations.
Preparation
I think a student who finds
that they still have so many untouched reading tasks a month to final
examinations may be found to have problems with using time well. At the
beginning of the school year, there is always plenty of leisure time because
everybody looks at exams in the distant future. It is at that point that a
student would consider that all their preparation can be broken up into bits
and spread over eight or nine months.
I know of some schools that
give students year-planning notebooks replete with all the guidelines for
daily, weekly and monthly monitoring of study and homework time. Interestingly,
the students may feel it is not fair to compel them to do this kind of planning.
Students who won’t use this kind of planer argue that they have mental
timetables which they have recourse to when they feel like studying!
Meaning of time
One important aspect I’d like to highlight
here is the problem of time: that human life is uniquely personal, but also
absorbed in the life of our cultures from which we draw the first meanings of
time.
Elizabeth Taylor, in a 1989 Time Magazine article noted that for a
child in kindergarten, the day is typically divided into time for listening,
playing, colouring, eating and sleeping. As children grow up their development
is determined by how well the social setting supports an organised approach to everyday
activities. But for many young people today growing up in challenging family
circumstances, the structure of the school day seems totally unfamiliar. They
often resist the idea that they should stop doing one thing simply because it
is time to do something else.
Taylor was interested in understanding why many
children of the urban-poor were so uncomfortable in school. She drew an explanation from the work of
University of Chicago Professor Dolores Norton, who had conducted a unique
study of the intellectual development of children in poor families. Dolores’
concluded that growing up in an unstructured home environment prevents
development of a sense of time that enables adaptation in school. ‘When these
children come to school, they enter a world that was not created for them and
that does not build their known skills,’ Norton noted.
She compared these young people growing in
challenging homes to students in a classroom with adults who speak their
language, yet are unable to interpret what they want them to do, even though
they wish to please them. A failure to understand the meaning of time, she
asserts, is a handicap that may partly account for the poor academic performance
of many inner-city children throughout their school careers.
Norton’s insights came from years of
observing forty children born to young mothers living in the most blighted,
impoverished pockets of Chicago. Norton found that references to time were rare.
Most parents hardly ever provided instructions like ‘finish lunch so you can
see your favourite TV program at 5:30,’ or ‘you can play for about half an hour.’
Daily routines, such as parents leaving home for work at a particular time and
regular times for bed and meals, are usually non-existent in these homes. Students
from disorganised homes may be able to read a clock, but that does not mean
they understand time. Norton found that most of her young subjects scored lower
than average on tests which measured their abilities to understand sequences of
events.
These insights may challenge parents to
provide support in developing students’ capacity, not only for managing time
well, but also managing their actions.
(A slightly edited version of this article was first published in the Daily Monitor newspaper)
