The amount of material that kids have to study these days is staggering. My nephew Ashwin has just completed his kindergarten and will be in the first standard from the next academic year. The amount of homework he used to bring home everyday was staggering. I used to feel sorry for him whenever I saw him struggling with pages and pages of homework he had to complete.
Kindergarten is supposed to be fun and learning is supposed to happen through games and activities. But nowadays, the kids are being taught words and sentences that many of us learned during our fourth or fifth standards. This raises the issue of having talented and qualified teachers in the primary schools and kindergartens. But one cannot expect a skilled professional for Rs. 2500 per month. Anjali has written an excellent post on this—The Sister Act.
In my opinion, we should give more importance to the early stages of the education of the kids. If we teach and train them well during the formative years, they would be self-sufficient and will have the necessary skills to find their way on their own when they grow up. But one of the problems with our education system is that we don’t give importance to the kindergartens and primary schools. The compensation package and hence the quality of the teachers at this level is abysmal. This has to change and the quality of the teachers has to improve (and they should have special training in teaching the kids). Otherwise the kids will learn many bad and wrong habits, which will be very difficult to correct later.
Now coming back to my nephew, he will be in the first standard this year. Before vacation, the school had started teaching cursive writing but could not complete it as there was not enough time to fit that too into the already crowded syllabus. So they took the easy way out. The wrote the alphabets on a book and send it with a note saying the kids should learn cursive writing during the holidays as the teachers will be using it in the first standard.
I was entrusted with the task of teaching my nephew cursive writing as well as revising the lessons of UKG. One problem that Ashwin’s teacher mentioned was that he was slow in writing and would not write more than a few pages at a stretch. But she was unable to find out the reason.
I asked Ashwin to write a few words and I could see what the problem was—his grip was wrong. He was gripping the pencil in the wrong way and was applying too much pressure on the pencil and on the paper. Since he was applying too much pressure on the middle finger, he couldn’t write for long at a stretch as there would be pain. Since he was applying too much pressure on the paper, the writing was slow.
I gave him a bigger pencil—a special three-sided pencil specifically designed for teaching the perfect grip (the tripod grip). Then I asked him to write without applying too much pressure. To show that he was applying too much pressure on the paper, I put a carbon paper a few pages below the page he was writing and after he wrote a sentence showed him the impressions of what he has written on the fifth page (this is a tip I got while searching the Internet).
Ashwin was finding this difficult. First he had to unlearn what he was doing till then. He had to maintain the correct grip and also concentrate on the pressure. To motivate him, I designed a token system. After each day’s session (between 6.30PM and 8.30PM), based on his performance, I would give him tokens. He could use these tokens to buy TV viewing time (only Cartoon Network and Pogo and there too only certain cartoon shows —Tom and Jerry, Oswald, Bob the Builder, Kipper, Popeye, etc.) or could use it to see a movie (animations from Walt Disney Pictures, Pixar, Dreamworks, etc.). He liked the idea very much.
To make study interesting I broke down the two hours into 10 minutes sessions. First 10 minutes we will study and the next 10 minutes I will tell a story. But here I faced a big challenge. I have been telling him stories since he was 3 years old and he knew most of the stories and in most cases, at least 5-6 variants of each. I had exhausted all the usual ones like Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, Sleeping Beauty, etc. long time back. I had also told him stories from Ramayan, Mahabharat, Bhagavatam, and Bible. He was familiar with Aesop fables, stories from 1001 Arabian Nights, Panchatantra and so on. He would make me tell a story 3–4 times and when he went to my home he would make my mother tell these stories again and again. So, this time I had turned to Greek mythology and started telling stories of Pegasus, Prometheus, Hercules and his 12 tasks, and so on. So every day I had to come up with new stories.
Our learning program was going smoothly. Some days, when he is not in the mood it is very difficult to make him do anything. He will withdraw into a shell and would not do anything. Yesterday was one such day. As soon as we started he showed signs of restlessness. He wouldn’t do anything I asked him to do. He started yawing and was totally disinterested.
After sometime, I got angry. I told me him to write, he refused. Then I told him that it is for his benefit the entire exercise is being done. I told him that I have better things to do and definitely don’t want to waste my time if he is not cooperating. Still there was no positive signs from his side and I became really angry and told him that if he doesn’t want to study, that is fine with me. So we stopped the class and I didn’t give him any tokens or told him any stories. I told my brother about it and went to my room to finish a chapter I was writing.
My brother called him and tried to explain the importance of learning and how I was trying to help. My nephew calls me ‘aachachen’ (his version of Alex achachen when he was young) He told my nephew, “Aachachen is very busy and has a lot of work to do. So when he tries to teach you, you should cooperate, because if you don’t learn to write fast, then you will have problems when you go the first standard.” He added “Aachachen was very sad with your behavior” to which my nephew replied “No, he was angry and he shouted at me!” After some time my nephew told my brother the following story:
First, we (aachachen and I) died and went to heaven. When we reached heaven we became angels and we were of the same age. Aachachen’s hair was black as mine, he was young like me and he could walk. As angels, we could travel at the speed of thought and we could be anywhere anytime we wanted. We could choose to be invisible or visible.
God was sitting in an air-conditioned room. We were made guards of that room. There used to a stream of dead souls from Earth. God will test each soul with a pointed needle and the good souls were allowed to enter heaven and the bad people were sent to hell. It was our duty to push the bad people into hell.
It was very hot outside as the sun was very close to heaven. The heat was unbearable and both of us were sweating profusely. So we entered God’s room and stood there as it was cooler inside. Then a drop of sweat from my forehead fell on the floor of the room. God was angry and he asked both of us to go and stay outside. Once outside, we again started sweating. We wiped the sweat and it fell down to the Earth. Once it entered the Earth’s atmosphere, it became rain. Since we were sweating excessively, the rainfall became very heavy and soon there was a huge flood and people and animals started dying. Seeing this God called us and allowed us to stay in his room and the flood stopped.
Aachachen was bored of being an angel. He wanted to eat good food, drink Coca-Cola and SevenUp. So one day he jumped down to the Earth. He landed in velliyammachi’s (grandmother’s) stomach, came out, and grew up. All this time I was serving God. When you (his dad) and amma got married I also jumped down, landed in amma’s stomach, came out and is now 6 years old.
So, the age difference between aachachen and me is because aachachen jumped from heaven 35 years before me. Because I was not selfish and served God for 35 years more, aachachen is my uncle and I am his nephew. But we were colleagues once and were of the same rank, so aachachen has no right (and there is no need) to scold me!!!!
This story is derived from many sources—Bible (the flood), Rayamana and Mahabharat (the previous life, life after death), Movie City of Angels (angles jumping down from heaven to become human), Movie Mission Impossible (the drop of sweat falling on the floor), Glucometer (he has seen a demo of the product, when we were planning to buy one for my mother) and God only knows what others.
So, today, I am looking forward to teaching my old colleague from heaven, treating him with respect he rightly deserves…