Students: Becoming Academically Excellent Through Non-academic Works
I became so busy last week because of my works in the school. In the next week, our Foundation Day will start and that will be so busy. Also, I will be competing in a pageant against the seniors of our school and I am only a freshman so I should be preparing carefully so that I can have my chance to win. That pageant caused me too much pressure these past few days because we came outside the school to have community extension activities and I didn’t make it to my academic works.
One of the candidates became so close to me. He is two academic years older than me. While we were on our trip to an orphanage that was required by our school for us as the candidates of the school’s major pageant, he told me about a student who became academically excellent through nonacademic works. I became interested of that since I am the ‘academically-minded child of the school’.
At first, I didn’t believe to him because how can non-academic works make you academically excellent? Besides, extra-curricular activities aren’t big enough to affect the final grades. And maybe, these activities are not capable of moving the grades somehow. He told me it is not about the points but the experiences that a student earn from the extra-curricular activities. These activities gave him too much ideas of how the world works. He used what he had learned in these activities in his academic works until he became academically excellent in his class.
Then, I remembered a classmate during my elementary days. He was academically excellent. Let me name him as ‘Man’, not his real name. But one of my classmates was more often than him in the extra-curricular activities. She was ‘Jem’. Man became as the highest student in our classroom before for almost four gradings and Jem ranked below him all the times. Through Jem’s good performances in extra-curricular activities, she moved from being a second honor into Man’s rank which was the first honor. She became the first honor in the final grading and Man was the second honor. You could notice that extra-curricular activities have effects to our grades too like what happened to Jem. That’s the advantage of extra-curricular activities, giving you ‘extra points’ in our cards. But extra-curricular activities are not the academic works that we should be paying attention to, but they are just ‘extra’ and not the entirety of our grades.
So here is the question, is it possible to become academically excellent through non-academic works?
For me, it is a ‘yes’. Like what one of the candidates told me, ‘academic excellence’ is not all about studying so hard that you could almost finish memorizing a book but also it is about other types of intelligences. Howard Gardner had theorized that there a lot of intelligences and we could use them in different ways. If we can use our intelligences in answering, we can be academically excellent! But always remember, balance all types of works you are busy into, because you might get away from the proper purpose of going to the school which is ‘learning’. Also, learning involves ‘socializing’ that is why we have these extra-curricular activities. If you socialize, you may learn different things easily from the people you encounter.
The school competitions that you join will teach you techniques of competing in the best behavior that you may use inside the class.