You Should Waste Your Time

It’s 12 pm on the first week of June. You turn in your exam, the bell rings, and there’s this overwhelming sense of relief that you won’t ever have to know anything from this class again.

Does this feel familiar?

Even in classes I’m interested in, I automatically put away learned material when I don’t feel the need for it anymore, giving my brain permission to forget everything irrelevant to my transcript. My motivation to learn about the subject falls when the direct reward for it doesn’t sit in front of me. 

Often, at SAS, we students are far more driven to learn if a grade is dangled in front of us. When a teacher goes extra in-depth while explaining a topic, it's common to hear someone ask: "Do we need to know this for the test?" In the two weeks after an AP exam, attendance rates drop when the post-exam learning is unassessed. To an extent, it’s no mystery why. A high GPA is seen as a reward for being “smart,” or having “academic excellence.” Instead of letting our curiosity lead us, our desire for this reward often results in a tunnel vision on class materials. 

Sometimes, we need the mental flexibility to absorb seemingly “irrelevant” information in order to look at things from a fresh angle. 

This unbalanced focus on goals over broad exploration isn’t SAS-exclusive. For one, robotics programs—though intended to help Singaporean students “[build]…understanding of how modern AI systems work”—are presented in a way that pressures children to focus on gaining a “cutting edge” in data science. AP courses give students a GPA boost, encouraging us to fixate on taking more advanced courses rather than choosing courses of interest.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. What's harmful is when this goal-driven focus prevents our minds from absorbing information we consider “irrelevant” to the goal. Alison Gopnik, an American professor of psychology, labels this focus as a “spotlight” view, and its opposite—taking in unfiltered information—as a “lantern” view. After all, a spotlight zeroes in on one part of a stage, while a lantern illuminates everything around it.

SAS students often use the spotlight view when paying attention to material in classes, overshadowing the lantern view of exploring a variety of subjects that may or may not relate to academic achievement. But the lantern view’s value shouldn’t be overlooked. If the spotlight view helps us reach our goals, the lantern view helps us uncover new ones. 

The lantern view can help us develop innovative thinking. Google recognizes this: its employees spend one day each week working on a side project so that they can explore different interests and gain ideas. This has even led to the invention of several products, including Gmail (honestly, can you imagine how we SAS students could function without Gmail?).

The lantern view is not only appreciated by Google. Steve Jobs attended a calligraphy class for his own interest despite thinking it had no “practical application.” Yet knowledge from the calligraphy class has shaped the Macintosh computer's aesthetic appeal to this day.

In other words, a lantern view can help us make connections and find fresh angles to solve problems. 

We should do this at SAS too. Perhaps it takes the form of joining clubs that let us explore our interests and curiosities even when we may not get leadership positions. Or it can be reading about subjects we don’t learn about in school. Maybe we won’t invent SASmail, but we can develop our thinking in a way that lets us problem-solve with new ideas. 

None of this means we should neglect the spotlight. It helps us apply our existing understandings and perceptions to solve problems and reach our goals. The lantern, though, helps us expand these understandings and perceptions. Without it, the ways we can apply our spotlight becomes limited.

With pending deadlines and various summatives, taking time to explore our interests with the lantern view seems like a waste of time. But it doesn't have to take days of extensive research. Sometimes, it can just be paying attention when your teacher goes into detail about something that won’t be on the test.

Next June, when the bell rings at 12 pm, you don’t need to study the same subject after you walk out of the school building. But maybe, if a question from the class comes back to mind, let it in. Think about it. It won’t be graded. But wouldn’t you like to know?