Time management for Life!

A news story carried in this daily on March 3, entitled ‘Mature candidates top exam malpractices list’, Executive Director of RNEC attributes the high rate of exam fraud among mature students to lack of adequate preparation time. John Weru delves into the issue of time management with regards to education. While studying Arabic at the university, our lecturer chose to share with us a few Arabic proverbs. One of the most memorable went something like ‘Al-Wakti sayaf’. I remember it because he repeated often. In English, that proverb means that time is like a sword. The rest of the proverb continues by saying that, if you don’t handle it carefully, it will cut you. The imagery of this saying may be severe, but the point it illustrates is clear – that for you to make a success of anything in life, you have to manage time effectively. Nowhere is the need to do this more pronounced than in the academic environment, especially when preparing for examinations. Unlike the traditional African school whose lessons were inculcated over a lifetime, formal schooling is predicated on passing a lot of skills and knowledge within a very limited time. Therein lies the challenge for students, young and mature alike. It would probably help if we looked to the man who is considered the Grandfather of Modern Education, John Amos Comenius who lived in the 17th century in what is now the Czech Republic. One of the principles he espoused on successful learning was that “ we should read a thing once to find out what it contains; a second time, to understand it; a third time, to imprint it on our memory; the fourth time we should repeat it silently to test ourselves whether we have firmly mastered it.” If you noticed, Comenius advocates for learning in small incremental steps. This enables concepts to be mastered slowly over time. But the question may arise, if I have so many other competing demands on my time, how can I make a success of my studying? It has often been observed that if you want something done well, give it to a busy person. That may sound like a paradox. Your being busy is not an excuse for inaction; instead it is a call to arms. Busy people are aware that their time is limited, hence the need to prioritize. A key to prioritizing well is to begin a task with the end in mind. The end of most education today is to pass examinations, such as are provided by the RNEC. Most students’ thoughts end at that, along with the satisfaction of seeing good results, considered to be the ticket to a dream life. However, that goal is a limited one. To explain why I say so, let me borrow another quote from Comenius. He says, “To understand anything is largely a matter of perceiving why and how that thing in any one of its parts is related to something else and how and to what extent it differs from other things that are similar to it.” Let us digest that statement. The objective of a good education is to open the mind, to discover new horizons and to perceive interconnections. We differentiate into subjects so as to manage the enormous amount of information available. But to paraphrase Albert Einstein, we should “ integrate empirically.” If our education is done with this objective, then we will turn studying and preparing for examinations from being a necessary evil into a pleasurable task. It will stop being about rote memorizing, or what is called ‘cramming’. Cramming is good for passing examinations, but it does not develop an educated mind. To enable an educated mind, we will need to set strategies on doing a little learning every day from the first day of the term. Each day, will be a day to do some little reading. By exam time, the concepts that we need to learn will have become so firmly embedded in our minds that we will only need to do a little revision. As we study our goal will be developing thinking and analytical abilities. We will also want to see how the parts of all that we are learning relate to the whole. That is what it means to integrate empirically. That ability to integrate information is what will save you in the examination room. For no matter how hard you have studied, there will always be questions that you did not expect, or that require deductive reasoning. Questions that require you to do more than just regurgitate information gleaned from textbooks. So dear student, it is still in the early in the school year. Start learning a little at a time this evening, and do the same thing tomorrow evening. When the exams come later this year, you will find that your load is a little lighter, and the examinations less scary. Let me end this article with another saying than the one I started with, time is a good slave but a bad master. Words by John Weru,Principal, Virunga Communication Centre, jonweru@yahoo.es