Finals season is here, which means it’s time to bury your head in a textbook and absorb every ounce of information you can. Then, the moment summer break begins, you can forget it all. That’s high school academics in a nutshell — memorize, regurgitate, move on.
Yet I’ve discovered that when I get a chemistry test back a week or two after taking it, I can’t understand why I lost points because I’ve forgotten everything from the last unit. If you ask me who Matteo Ricci is right now, I would vaguely remember hearing his name in a history lecture a couple months ago, but I wouldn’t be able to tell you a thing about him. Our classes are so fast-paced that I never have a chance to truly digest what we’re learning — as soon as one test is over, it’s time to focus on the next one.
While this cycle of memorizing and forgetting is often enough to earn us decent grades on assessments, the ability to regurgitate information doesn’t translate to real-life success.
In fact, the current world is much scarier than any test we’ll ever take. For instance, how do we handle geopolitical unrest, a mounting mental health crisis, the rapid rise of AI and countless other challenges? We don’t know. Because for the first twenty-something years of our lives, we’re force fed information instead of learning to actually think for ourselves. We’re taught to accept answers — not question them.
But the “why” and “how” matter just as much as — if not more than — the “what.” Instead of being given an out-of-context math formula, I want to learn how to derive it. Instead of taking history notes every day, I want to discuss the events we learn about, to contemplate the weight of people’s past actions. When I truly understand what I’m learning, not only do the lessons become more meaningful, but the information also sticks better in the long run.
After all, the lessons that have stayed with me the most are not the ones where I copied notes off a board. Rather, I remember gasping when I looked at cells through a microscope in biology class, slamming my pencil down when I independently figured out how to solve a math problem I used three sheets of notebook paper on, and blinking tears from my eyes as we watched videos of Holocaust survivors telling their stories in Modern World History.
I admit that in a world of countless AP classes and cutthroat college admissions, slowing down to think deeply isn’t easy. But I urge you to take a moment to ask why something works the way it does, or to ponder a question for a few minutes instead of turning straight to the answer key. Slowly but surely, you’ll gain critical thinking skills essential to your future — not just the ability to ace an exam.
