Grades and Priorities

I'm so sorry I've been away for too long. I thought the school holidays would be brimming with blogging activity but instead I dropped off the face of the internet! Here's my thoughts in relation to returning to school.

Education is really important and I love to know things. Reading books by intelligent authors, examining famous paintings and learning how to calculate the diagonal in a room of x dimensions makes life more rich and interesting for me. I think we need education, but school- I'm not so sure. I found this quote yesterday~

The essential thing measured by school is whether or not you are good at school.

Being good at school is a fine skill if you intend to do school forever.  For the rest of us, being good at school is a little like being good at Frisbee.  It’s nice, but it’s not relevant unless your career involves homework assignments, looking through textbooks for answers that are already known to your supervisors, complying with instructions, and then, in high-pressure settings, regurgitating those facts with little processing on your part. -Seth Godin 

I'm not too bad at being good at school and school is great when I'm learning. These words remind me to prioritise- is it better to have an amazing design portfolio that will help my career later in life or to do the greatest English comprehension homework the world has ever seen? I don't suggest totally disengaging from the classroom, you don't have to. I just think sometimes the skills you need in life that aren't valued by school need attention too. 

Occasionally you work really hard on a task and the way it's graded doesn't reflect the understanding you have of the topic (maintaining eye contact during a speech doesn't prove you know how a volcano works the same way using correctly structuring your essay doesn't prove you can comprehend the themes in Hamlet). I think the best way to deal with these situation is to think 'did I learn something?' and if the answer is yes, you might not always ace school but you'll probably have an enjoyable life. 

xx