BellTIME
BellTIME
Fred Tuite Schools and colleges are both institutes of learning and education but they differ widely in their approach. It is important to grasp this before you head from one to the other. You will be learning in college all right but you have to do it in a situation where almost everything you know about teaching and learning is different.
Independent Learning The key factor is independent learning. This means that you take responsibility for your own learning. Being in school is like travelling in a bus. The teacher is the driver who knows where he is going, the route and the direction, and provided you don’ t mess too much, almost all is taken care of. When you get to college you have to step off the bus and find your own way.
So say goodbye to teachers explaining every step to you, to breaking things down to their simplest forms, to them explaining and checking that you have understood and to assigning you homework and marking it carefully. Instead you will have lecturers who
School v College
will give you a broad sweep of the area or highlight some of the key concepts or areas of debate. Then you are expected to go off and read up on the rest of the subject yourself.
You may have tutorial groups( small classes where you present your learning and research and where you get feedback on that), lab work where you conduct experiments and write up notes, intensive classes in languages or other areas or project work where you are given practical or creative tasks to complete.
But the key factor is that you have to do all this work yourself. Whereas in school the teacher might go through Hamlet and explain the difficult words, phrases and characters. In college you might have to study Shakespeare’ s Tragedies and read them all( Lear, Macbeth, Coriolanus, Othello etc.) by yourself and write intelligently on them. Likewise you will cover vast parts of Maths or Science or languages in weeks and be expected to make sense of it all.
Freedom One of the great things about college is the freedom it offers.
Unlike school where you have to account for yourself for almost every minute of the day,( think of what happens if you arrive late for class) in college you have the option of attending or not. Nobody will care or indeed nobody will miss you. But then if you do miss classes, lectures or labs you will soon find yourself behind and struggling to keep up. One key reason for the high dropout rate in some colleges is the fact that people do not bother going to classes. The more you miss the more you have to do yourself and do your own catching up. The more you defer it the more pressure you put on yourself.
Another feature of college is that you can have a lot of free time. If you do Law or Arts you might find yourself with as little as 9 hours of class a week. How you spend the rest of the time is up to you, but they do assume you are studying and researching. In other courses like Science or Engineering it is the opposite you might have classes or labs from 9 to 5 and are still expected to study after that. But your freedom can be constrained also as some courses insist that you
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