learning plans

I remember when I was a child, I was studying in a city named Macau. It is a city that is heavily influenced by the Asian style of education. The Asian style of education I mentioned is something extremely similar to behaviourism where you get rewarded when achieving a good studying result, get punished when achieving a bad studying result. This form of studying style heavily influenced my childhood. And one of my worst studying experiences happened when I was in 6th grade. It was a Chinese class where we studied the explanation of Chinese words. In that class, my teacher asked me up and asked me to explain the definition of the word she wrote on the blackboard. I was trying to use my understanding to explain the word in a different way, different but has a similar meaning (at least that was what I thought). My teacher, an actually very nice teacher, told me that I should explain that exactly the same as it was written in the textbook, I was upset because I could not get a reward answering that question. And since then, I only memorized definitions of words as exactly as the textbook describes. To rethink it, it is not very bad that my teacher asked my classmates and me to do everything the same as the textbook describe, after all, it was a very large class, and it would be easier for teachers to manage in that way. But it was still very frustrating to me, and it took me a very long time to move on from that studying method. And to rethink it, it may be because my unique explanation interrupt my teacher’s teaching plan, which was why she asked me to follow the textbook so that the whole class could stay on track with her teaching plan. To me, now it is understandable after all they only had a very short period of time to teach us an overload of lectures, and it actually gave me a unique perspective to see education.