The Chaff from the Wheat

Last week seemed to last a year. The weekend, however, was vanished in the blink of an eye.

A number of slow-simmering work pressures came to a head last week, and had an overwhelming effect on me. Although my studies and my job are not inextricably intertwined, it was extremely difficult to stay motivated and keep moving with my reading and planning amidst a flurry of unnecessary stresses that cost me a great deal of sleep. Breaking away for the weekend, and taking a little time off from study, actually helped to restore my perspective. All work and no play, et cetera. Well, this weekend I played and it definitely helped.

This seemed to have done the trick. When I got back to work today, classes went swimmingly, even though Saturdays are heavy teaching days for me. There was a varied pace and a remarkable amount of interest in today’s lessons. One thing did strike me though, and it may point to an area for later research.

In order to cover a piece of marginally important introductory reading, I assigned my final year students sections of a chapter as a jigsaw reading activity. I demonstrated how to summarize a passage with the introduction, boiling one page down to a one-minute briefing. The results were extremely enlightening. I had intended this activity to last for no more than fifteen minutes, but despite my repeated emphasis on the need to summarize for their classmates, students omitted not one single detail, and we went considerably over time. This is in line with the experience of my colleagues, who find that students rewrite entire chapters of their textbooks from memory during exams, with very limited regard to the actual question. I also recall that in the Foundation and First Year Listening courses, students are always flummoxed by activities where they must distinguish main ideas from details. It is true that the latter may be a problem for students the world over, but the memorization of complete texts without extracting the essence seems to be a common factor here. It is not clear whether students are keen to prove that they haven’t missed anything, or whether they are actually struggling to separate the chaff from the wheat. The reality is that under exam situations this much chaff is separating them from success. How can this phenomenon be understood?