Dear Students,

Recess week has given me the much needed breather to blog for you. I hope you are coping well so far—and that this blog post will serve you. I’m writing to respond to your concerns regarding the weekly quizzes:

Student X: “I find myself struggling to put a benchmark to my understanding. Meaning, I am unable to measure whether I have truly understood the concepts taught in the lecture. And thus, I go into quizzes not knowing whether I am truly fully prepared. I would greatly appreciate if you could offer your advice on the steps I can take moving forward as I desire to do well for the course.”

Student Y: “How do we come up with metaphors / analogies to concretise our understanding of philosophical concepts?”

From these concerns, I am able to extrapolate the following questions you may have:

(1): What counts as adequate preparation before the quizzes?
(2): How to adequately prepare for the quizzes?

There are no one-size-fit-all answers to these questions. Each of you have your own unique challenges when it comes to understanding the course content. Therefore, one general approach you could take is to revise. Ask yourselves what exactly was it that you failed to grasp that had caused you to make the mistake. If done correctly, you should be able to state why you made that mistake (e.g., I confused a claim about what is intrinsically valuable and a claim about what we ought to pursue). Keep a journal of your mistakes and don’t let your failures or high expectations hinder you from benefitting from this course intellectually! Philosophy requires a level of clarity that people usually take for granted and so, it’s natural to find the quizzes challenging.

If you find yourselves struggling in despair, please schedule a consultation with me so we can work something out together.

I’ll end this post by sharing some of the broader concerns I have regarding your quizzes. Your weekly quiz results matter to me because if you are struggling with them, it is likely that you would allow (either consciously or subconsciously) your quiz performance to dictate the agenda of our tutorials. Tutorials are meant to engage you with the week’s philosophical topic and to avoid missing out on the interesting class discussions we can have, we really need to take care of your approach to the quizzes. So this is a sincere call for you to reach out to me if you find the quizzes to be a dominant and recurring concern for you. I’ll speak to you individually about this once we meet.

Best,
YT.