School, the Game; part 2

As a followup to what I’ve written in the past about school essentially just being a playground for students to figure out the best way to get around doing work, I’m going to talk now about how students turn studying into a game.

Currently, I have a wicked huge International Business exam that I should be studying for, but I’ve taken time out to write this. What I’ve noticed myself doing (and I assume others do this, otherwise this post would be worthless) is trying to figure out what exactly could potentially be worthy enough to find its way onto the exam. Like picking through the dark meat on a turkey, I scour the terms and ideas to find out what the teacher would think is important. It is in this way that it’s like a game. It’s not so much that we want to learn about transnational strategies for international business, it’s that I think the teacher would think it’s important. So at the end of the semester, it’s not so much that I happy that I’ve learned something new, it’s more that I’ve figured out how to study for this particular teacher’s exams.

This doesn’t always happen, but more often than not it does. Some teachers have pretty concise material that you just have to know while others – like in this course I have an exam in – just throw seven chapters at you and hope you remember every minute detail.

I don’t think that it’s really a great way to learn cramming everything into your head that may or may not be applicable to the course. Maybe I’m wrong, I don’t know.