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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