Being a Scholar

By Erickson Tjoa

 

 

After almost three years in university education and a total of almost ten years in Singapore’s education system, as well as being very fortunate to be part of two scholars programmes in NTU, thoughts on “learning” keep recurring every once in a while. I thought it was apt to bring up the thoughts for others to think, disagree or simply reflect. I hope I am privileged enough to have your readership and provoke your mind, to nudge your heart even if just a little.

Let me begin with this question: what is a scholar?

Etymology alone can get you to various definitions – Wiktionary[1] would, for instance, associate scholar to mean generally one of the three things (which I believe is pretty nicely done):

1. A student who studies in a school or college (i.e. a “schooler”), typically holding a scholarship.
2. A specialist with deep expertise in a particular field.
3. A learned, erudite person.

Most of us are not (2), though some of us do know a lot and probably will become such specialists in future. A veteran investment banker, a professor, an industrial researcher, experienced teacher, and many others – these will count as (2). Most of us[2] are of category (1). We are all studying (or perhaps have just graduated), and we have (or had) the great opportunity to be part of a programme such as USP and to be granted the means to help us further our goals (or in seeking them).

What do we make of (3)? Are we scholars in the sense of (3)? How about people who do not have scholarships, but decidedly a learned person? Instead of going into battles of semantics and definitions, allow me to ask:

Are we learning?

The simplest way to start this is to begin bluntly. Let us consider the whole notion of grades and GPA. For many of us, “scholars” or not, grades are everything. So much so that we would sometimes be rather calculating in terms of whether to S/U certain courses, to look for which one is easier, to ask about how to get the A instead of how to understand concepts, to spot questions, to rely on bell curves – the list goes on. And to some of us, the term “scholar” carries extra weight – it means that you see yourself as one who cannot underperform below a certain threshold, consciously or not.

Now, no one would be so crazy to act holy and say “these are totally bad, we should not be doing this at all!” and I believe that putting importance on grades is not bad in itself. To flip the situation, if you perform very badly in your exams or GPA, your employer or admission office may first wonder whether it is your ability or your work ethic/motivation that is the problem. The former is not as bad as the latter, for a prospective employee that has bad work ethic or is lazy or unmotivated is presumably detrimental to the employer. In other words, grades can be viewed as necessary but generally not a sufficient condition for success.

So, does that mean we should go all out fighting tactical and technical war of grades with the rest of the world?

I would assume that the answer is no (though it is a good point to disagree, heh). The reason is because in general, if one learns well, the grades will follow but the converse is not true: if one’s grades are good, it does not mean one has learnt well. Certainly such a strong statement is easier said than followed in principle, is it not? Indeed. Most of us belong to education system where grades are almost impossibly difficult to decouple from learning – many believe that if their grades are good, it is necessarily the case that they have had the right way of learning. But a simple retrospection of going through “past year papers”, “ten-year series”, “solution templates” and “mock exams” will alert you that a mindless, blind grinding through questions and examination papers can only get you so far. In such a system, it is relatively easy for one to forget the distinction between good grades from good learning and those from blind grinding.

Have you ever felt that you are not cut out for say, physics, mathematics, or something else? Have you asked yourself why, especially if you actually managed to get through other hardships? Some of us take up multiple club activities and juggle meetings etc. so madly that at times it is unbelievable that the person is alright at the end of the day. Some of us went for competitions, went for internships and did things that required steep learning curves, and got past it. Yet, the same person may well complain that a certain subject is too hard for him or her, or he or she is simply uninterested and thus reasons that that’s why they cannot do well. And this is especially true if these subjects or things to learn are mandatory (e.g. GER Core, Major Cores, or other things mandatory to learn about).

Where is the problem?

In the midst of this whole mess are two things I believe we often do not recognize[3] (myself included):

1. We have only regarded learning as a selective act based on what is useful.
2. We have simply forgotten what it means to learn.

The first point means that unless the thing we are confronted with serves our immediate interests, we would not learn them. The “interest” may be to clear modules, earn an easier “A”, or CV boosters (e.g. competitions). In these things, even if it is a little hard due to whatever reasons, we will try hard, and some of us so hard that he or she may lose sleep. On the other hand, once the thing before us is one that does not matter, if it is easy we will simply breeze through them, and if it is hard often we would be in some sense seeking shortcuts: thinking we are not cut out for it, finding an easy way out, or in context of some courses, simply S/U-ing the course with half the effort. This brings us to the next point: that we may have simply forgotten what it means to learn something.

A simple illustration is apt: consider that you, a non-physics student, are taking astronomy as a course (within or outside USP it is generally popular). Formulae scare you. But how many of us would simply go in and ask yourself, “Is there any fun fact about the stars that I don’t know? Why the heck do people bother studying the stars? Is the teacher a good explainer of concepts that are totally alien to me?” Of course, with limited AUs, there may be better things to do. But if this course is one of the few things you shortlisted, did those thoughts or similar ones come to mind?

What I want to bring across is that in the purer sense of learning, we learn precisely because we want to know something which we are otherwise unfamiliar with. If we have somewhat big gap in knowledge, we ought to find out how to best close the gap. Such a situation is what we call the steep learning curve, a phrase familiar to most. When notes are insufficient, we look for Google, Wikipedia, books. We ask our teachers or professors about what we do not understand. When stuck with homework, ask the professor why this or that does not work, or how to start thinking about the problem, or where to look for clues instead of hoping for online ready-made answers.

Sounds cliché, for sure. It’s somewhat a grandmother’s advice for kids who just started school. Yet, most of us probably have not done these. Some have the standard reasoning: “how can I know what I don’t know?”, or “textbooks are too much for someone who is not going into the field”, and many others.

Yet, in general, unless you know the subject itself inside out, there is no way that even your lecture notes upon reading has nothing you can ask about. Even simple questions like “why must the definition be this way? Do I have counterexample where it does not work?” would have generated plenty of meaningful conceptual questions to help grasp the ideas. This is something I realized when I saw myself struggling to do these while some PhD students in my class do this quite liberally.

It is actually far from surprising that we forgot how to learn for ourselves, how to appreciate things, how to consciously struggle through hard courses. Furthermore, these things seem very transient – for our school life ends as soon as we convoke (yep, convoke is verb for convocation). But without starting early to reteach ourselves how to learn, I am afraid we may eventually be finding it even increasingly harder to learn things in our workplaces, and in learning to cope with life.

I shall not try to speak for everyone – but I am sure in whatever you do in future, there are things we will surely have to learn: soft skills, technical skills, or even social skills in managing people or interactions. But even for me now, advanced courses in 4th year physics and beyond started to make me feel academia is not suitable for me because I find this “learning process” too hard. Yet, it may be because the way we were told to learn – or perhaps we were “programmed” to learn via those assessments – can only last up to certain level. And I suspect this is happening to me now, and unless I embrace learning better, I will always be stuck here. Unless we extricate ourselves from “bad” ways of “learning” (for lack of better words), it will cause trouble and agony for much of our lives in future.

In particular, we may find ourselves easily devastated by what we could not accomplish. We start to find failures as real limits of our being instead of temporary mistakes that adaptability can solve. We start to find talent the most convincing explanation of unfairness in the world. We start to find hard work “too much effort to invest in”. We start to blame teachers easier than blaming ourselves for our lack of flexibility in figuring out ways to deal with things when things go wrong. We start to lose sight of the fact that we learn for ourselves, and not for our employers. We start to find dreams a privilege for the stronger. We start to think of grades as ends instead of means – and forgot that while bad results indicate that something is wrong with our knowledge or learning, good results does not imply that we have been doing it right.

To end this, I make a disclaimer that I do not choose to write this because I have an answer. Maybe you do have one. This is a success if it at least sets you thinking even just a little about the topic. It is just a personal reminder that perhaps, only when we change ourselves and how we deal with learning, a lot of things in life may actually be easier to chew and less miserable when things go wrong. I personally feel that I myself have forgotten how to learn, and my GPA does not quite reflect this deficiency, and unless I change myself very soon, my personal route in academia is going to be close to impossible. If you suspect the same is true for your case, re-examine and step out of your convention. There are so many things to learn and appreciate out there, more than just meeting deadlines and doing exams – and perhaps life could be better handled.

Perhaps. And hopefully.

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/scholar

[2] Or all of us, if you consider the travel grant itself a scholarship, which I do feel is a good way of thinking about one of the perks of the programme.

[3] Because this gets a bit long, this will be the last part of this full note.