ery.djunaedy

Think!

Do you know The Houw Liong? Probably not, unless you have taken some physics course at the Institut Teknologi Bandung (ITB).

The first of the three-words name is actually a (Chinese) family name, not English “the”. He is a professor of Physics at the Institut Teknologi Bandung. When I did my undergrad at the ITB, he taught a course called Modern Physics.

There were many classes for this course taught by different professors. But his class was special in two ways.

Firstly, it was famous to be a killing ground even for A students. When the exam result for this course was released, we used to say to each other (in Indonesian) “Rapat kanan, guys”, which literally means we had a “right margin” grades.

You know, the grades are listed next to our names with A, B, C, D and E columns. Depending on the grade of each student, an A or B or C or D or E was marked black with pencil to be read by computer scanner. The grades was called “right margin” because from a distant, the marked columns were mostly columns D and E which are on the right hand side of the list. Only a few would have an A or B.

On my batch, there was only one A, I can’t remember the Bs and Cs, but most of us got D. Many of us failed with a E, and they would have to join the veterans (as a one-starred veteran) to repeat the class the following year. Some of them had the honour to pass the class as a three-star veteran.

I got a D the first time round, and was too happy to pass it on the first try that I didnt even think to repeat it the following year just to upgrade my grade. I could not even think why D in the first place, why not C and why not E. Bottomline is: I passed on the first shot.

Secondly, and this is an even more important and unique nature of that particular class that made the class unbelievably notorious, the exam questions were the same since forever.

The exam paper from the previous generations were available to us in the ITB, so that we can learn from them. For this particular class, we have gathered the exam questions since many years back, and came out with the same conclusion: they were more or less the same. Some will have slightly different questions, but you can always say that the exam of this year is exactly the same with the exam of that year.

So there I was, preparing my final exam by answering the exam questions from the exam of the previous years. I answered all the questions easily because I can still open the text book, I can swap notes with my friends and see how they answer them.

And guess what? On the exam day, we were smiling to each other when we found out that the exam questions were exactly the same as what we have answered, revised and memorised only days or even hours ago.

Without further delay, I answered all of the questions, re-read my answers and submit it to the invigilator. For the first time, the whole class had the same feeling about the exam: we can answer all of the questions with a text-book precision.

As you have already known, the result of the exam is the “right-margin” grades.

***

Every professor has his (or her) own eccentricities, of course. But I do not write this article to make a joke about Prof The. It took me a very long time to realize what he has been doing all these years with those eccentric exams.

I would probably never realized it if I did not swap places from a student to become a teacher. As a teacher, you have the advantage of knowing more about a subject, and the advantage of knowing it earlier so that you know what mistakes you have made so far, what kind of information is needed to achieve a certain level of expertise in the topic, and you also know how someone should process and digest the information.

When you look at your students reports, its amazing how you can actually reconstruct how they think. You can see which students actually collect the information from the sources you specified, which of them try to find from other sources, and which of them can digest the information and construct a knowledge out of it.

The process of gathering information and constructing a knowledge out of it is what is called thinking. And this thinking process is the most important academic achievement any students should strive for. And this is what Prof The has been emphasizing all these years through his unique exam.

I did not realize it initially, but now I remember it very clearly. He once said to us in one of his lectures (not the exact words, but more or less), “In the future, I will not need your answers in the exam paper. During the exam, I will just put a helmet on every one of you and detect the brain activities, and from that conclude which one of you actually think.”

He still does not have the helmet until now, but somehow he can extract the same information from our answers in the exam papers, exactly what he has been doing all these years. What most of us did in the exam was simply repeating the information as found in the text book. While this would certainly involve a certain level of brain activities, the level is very low in the scale that Prof The used. That explains the “right margin” grades that we had. Only the select few of us who was able to construct a applicable knowledge from this information, and those are the ones who are honored with A’s in Prof The’s class.

***

As a teacher now, I can see how ignorant myself during my student days. Ignorant about what was really important in the result of the education process. Gathering and memorizing information is not the ultimate goals of education. The ability to digest information, construct a knowledge out of it, and know how to use the knowledge are the ultimate goals of education process.

As a teacher now, I can really appreciate how difficult the students position is when they have a teacher who does not provide them with a conducive environment to think. Oh yes, there are many teachers of this kind, the ones who simply kick the students in the butt and expect them to run without even considering whether these students know how to crawl or not.

What makes me sad is watching the history repeats itself: (some of) my students have the same ignorance as what I have years before, even with my full effort to become a helping hand. Well, the least I can do is to tell them the wisdom I have collected from Prof The, and hope that they would not need many years to realize what is important in education.
Al-Ain, 25-Feb-2006