Tuesday, 16 October 2012

making a realistic curriculum for children




Pushing too much on children makes them unable to learn...the backlog is always there and they are always lagging. This makes them lose confidence and they are unable to learn even the easy bits. If only the powers that be would place emphasis on quality and not on quantity, it would make a huge difference. If only they would ensure that however little is taught, it  is taught well and learnt well,  education would be a success story. 
I used to go to a hostel for tribal children run by our organisation. There was one boy in the 6th class who had a beautiful maths notebook-- all problems solved, very neatly written with good remarks from the teacher. These were problems on addition / subtraction of fractions.  During the course of my conversation, he admitted he could not subtract a two digit numbers from another. Then how did he do the problems in his book? He said he copied them from his friend. 
I said I would teach him. I went to the blackboard and started. Now all his friends came up and wanted to join in. So I made many columns on the board and gave numbers at random. They all noisily solved them, and in the process taught  this boy  how to subtract. He learnt it within that one hour I spent there. 
At an appropriate age, different for different children, they learn very easily. Earlier on, it's a terrible task, and they never learn. I noticed this with my two children and the ill effects of this forced teaching is still felt by one of them even after 23 years .
The Montessori system addresses this by keeping together children of different ages – say 4-6 or so and letting them learn at their own pace.
But all this requires committed teachers who understand how to judge learning outcomes.


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