The independent student

I remember my first day of class at University, back in March 1997. I was yet to turn 17 years old, and was going to have my first “adult” class called Communication Theory. Besides making fast friends with an amazing group and despite the annoying pranks on us freshmen that day, what it’s more vivid in my mind was something the professor Ant?nio Hohlfeldt said: “from now on, you are responsible for your academic life. You are on your own. It’s time to become independent and we teachers won’t take you by the hand and do the job for you”. Can you imagine what that meant in a time BEFORE internet?

I must say I don’t remember much from that class because, well it was back in 1997(!), and honestly Hohlfeldt was not the most engaging of teachers, in my opinion. But that sentence struck me and I took it to heart.

I don’t remember people going to the teacher to ask “where do I find this information?”, “why are we having an exam?”, “can I hand in my paper later?”, “I have a question about the project”. If ever these questions were asked, it had to be during class, in person. Face to face. Emails were not a common thing yet, we didn’t have this instant channel (which is often abused) to reach our professor with such questions. Thankfully!

Having to figure out what all those concepts meant, having to be responsible for our own life was how things were. I was 17 years old that first year and I needed to make decisions about my scheduling. For which courses would I enroll? What are the exams? How do I study for them without much guidelines?

Emails were not a common thing yet, we didn’t have this instant channel (which is often abused) to reach our professor with such questions.        

That was one of the biggest learning lessons I had and I applied this independency into all my other studies and, especially, jobs.

Now, note that I was never a 10 (or an A) student. On the contrary, I had quite a few “resits” or G2 as we called it back then. So it’s not like I was the nerdy nerd and this was easy for me to assimilate. I was still a teenager. But I took my future seriously. I wanted to be a journalist. I wasn’t going to expect any teacher to guide me by the hand, tell me exactly how to do things.

I soon started working at a radio station, and I could have tried the “can you make an exception for me this time?”. But, no. I figured out a solution, which was to work during the day and go straight to class at night. So I did my remainder 3 years of journalism studies at night. I was always home by 22:00 (10:00pm).

So it was truly a matter of paying attention to what was said in class, reading class materials and doing the work, even when I hated it (and I did hate it many times). Or asking help from classmates. But let me emphasize the READING part. We had a lot of stuff to read. Theoretical books. And it was hard. But, as our slogan said, “I’ve read Theory of Communication and I’ve survived”. Oh, and there was no online, remember... so we had to actually go to the library, find the book by a code among hundreds of shelves and read.

Sounding like an old lady, I will say “kids these days...” don’t read. Don’t want to read. Have no concentration spam to read. But they say they want to learn... ok. Of course, technology carries a big blame in that. They were born with internet, information – granted, shallow information – at their fingertips. So they didn’t have to read a lot. Especially, difficult texts.

So it was truly a matter of paying attention to what was said in class, reading class materials and doing the work        

So it is our job as teachers to make them read for their learning, to expend their minds (figuratively but also literally). And it is their job to figure out how to take on this challenge. To become independent. To stop sending emails asking things that have already been informed and can be found on course materials. To figure things out independently.