How would you spend the last minutes of your life if you only had half an hour left?

The teacher raised this question to his students who are about to graduate, and each of them will take a different path in the university and the university of Life. Since the question here is not traditional, the students' responses were non-stereotypical and variant. The teacher sat in the coffee shop during an exhausting day and began to read the different responses his students had. 

One of them wrote: “I kiss my mother’s hands and try to sleep, but I forget to

Another said: “I pray, for there is satisfaction and safety in prayers.”

And on another piece of paper, he read another response “My life goes on as if nothing will ever happen…”.

The readings frequently continued until a student’s response caught his attention: “If I had half an hour left of my life, I would, with genuine sincerity, wish to spend it in one of your educational classes…”. Filled with ecstasy and pride, the teacher adjusted his seat and smiled.

However, he was shocked by what the student explained at the bottom of his paper: “...because one minute in school passes as if it were a year, and at this moment, I live as if it is eternity ..”!

Many of those entrusted to enlighten are always creative in implanting darkness. Many of our students are wearing out ambition and creativity in the educational dungeons and suffer from the repressive authority in the classrooms. Until one thinks that freedom in knowledge is an abomination of the devil's work.

What do our curricula offer today's generations besides dedicating other than dedicating corrugated and retarded skills such as rumination, memorization, and repetition? 

Irrefutable results have proved our curricula to prepare generations of the past, not future generations. Curricula that hinder the official exams' circumvention are just different from each other by the headers and the dates of their conduct only. This is a great betrayal against an entire generation of hidden treasures.

It is known that education nowadays is so sensitive that it prepares an entire generation for a completely unknown future. A future in which many jobs retire to intelligent robots and where innovation beats skill. In light of these challenges, educational policymakers should be creative in anticipating tomorrow rather than jogging on treadmills where reality stands still in an age that is accelerating daily toward the unknown.

On the other hand, education for the sake of exams, which measures the level of knowledge and not the level of understanding, is, in a sense, a dedication to ignorance, mummification of the present, and stereotyping of the future.

How can science, for example, be naughty in one place and exciting in another? And who may convince me that the music teacher who mocked one of the most beautiful minds in history, Albert Einstein, was right when he told him: “You are not good at using the multiplication table, so how do you want to play music on the violin?”

Perhaps two decades later, he reconfigured many concepts and did what the pioneers could not do, to the extent that when one of his prophecies in the field of light was validated, the newspapers put on their cover pages a picture of the earth saying: “Einstein passed from here...”.

If the moment of electricity discovery constituted a turning point in world history, a turning point for effective survival depends on discovering the light that lurks in the depths of our students. A true teacher is one who, whenever he teaches, learns, and he discovers, reveals.

Each educational strategy is a key that unlocks windows in the learners’ minds, not only to bring light into their deepest selves but also to allow hidden suns in the souls of generations to find their path to the external sensory world. And since knowledge begins with a question, our supreme mission, as educators, is to allow our students to ask questions, especially those that are different and extracurricular, and even those questions that we think do not lead because the educational process characterized by the freedom of questions, is undoubtedly a safe place for answers...

In this way, we,  educators, are prophecy revealers and explorers. We do what scientists, poets, and innovators who live on the outskirts of the world do. We try to spy on the unseen to bridge the gap between doubt and truth with the dust of knowledge. As teachers, we must try to change our role from being the focus of the learning cycle to the ones who observe it. 

Most of what we do is draw our students' attention with bewilderment of questioning and observe them pursue scientific research through various methods and strategies. These ways connect what they don't know with what we want them to know. 

Just as no one drowns in the dead sea, let’s increase the salt of knowledge, imagination, and scientific curiosity as we prepare to build our students not to drown or turn blind.