LESSON-FREE

The previous semester is probably the worst I ever had.

I did not learn anything in most of my subjects and I spent most of my time gazing in space, wondering why in the world did I ever became so unfortunate to be under instructors who simply refuse to give justice to their titles.

To say that I am disgruntled is an understatement. I was frustrated and discouraged that I lost all inclination to go to school or study my lessons. And let me make this clear, I am not the only one. The rest of my classmates all felt the same.

Who wouldn’t? We force ourselves to wake up early in the morning to attend our classes only to wait for hours in the classroom because either our instructor forgot that we have a class or they simply would not show up without any explanation. We did not learn anything because if ever they would show-up in class, they would discuss things that are not related to our subject or give us works totally unrelated to our lessons. There are times when we are given tasks without knowing if what we are doing is related to our lessons (which we do not get anyway) or not.

Probably a lot of students would be more than happy to exchange places with us because a lot of my acquaintances from other courses find it nice that we are constantly in holiday. However, none of us in class thinks so. This, being the last year of our stay in college, is probably the most important part of our college life. A lot of us felt that we are still unprepared and we still have a lot of things to learn to prepare us to the world that awaits us after we graduate, that we felt disappointed with what happened to us.

We enrolled in these classes with high expectations and eagerly anticipating the many things we could learn from it. But after the month-long consecutive meetings with no ‘real’ classes, we lost interest in the subjects. There are times when we no longer bother going to our classroom to check if we are going to have classes or not because we know from experience that it would be a waste of time. Experience is the best teacher as they say, and we have surely learned from it.

What hurts us the most is the fact that while we are getting more and more frustrated everyday by the lack of lessons, our teachers are still enjoying their salaries for the job that they did not even fulfill.

We are here in school to learn, to be trained for the so-called real world and not to spend our time worrying if our instructors still exists or not. That is why they are called teachers, because they are being paid to teach. Of course, we still have instructors who give their best to fulfill their duties but this does not erase the fact that we could have learned more if all of our instructors are like the few who would give everything to train us.

This is a sad truth that most people refuse to acknowledge. It is not always true that when a student does not learn anything he/she is dumb or lazy. Sometimes, a student does not learn anything because some teachers prefer to have lesson-free classes and self-declared holidays.

The things we had experienced under these instructors are the kind of things that we wish we never experienced at all And if I would be given the chance to turn back the time and change something, this holiday-filled semester will be the one thing I would change first.