They hold pencil in one hand and eraser in other hand. This seems a common style of writing these days. No sooner they make a mistake they want to erase and correct it. It may be a factual error, or a compute error, or even a case of bad hand-writing. Erasing your mistakes may seem right thing to do - after all children are conscious of their own mistakes, but it has unwanted consequences.
Firstly, by erasing their mistakes they forget about it and make similar mistakes down the line. Leaving a mistake on the page - there to see - helps in identifying it next time you do it. Secondly, most children are not careful in erasing, as a result their writing only becomes more smudgy. Some times the paper is torn as well. Why can't you simpley draw a clean line across your mistake and leave it there for the future ?
Secondly, this habit seem to undermine their confidence. The line between a 'mistake' and 'not getting it exactly correct' is very thin. For example, ask children to draw freely and they hesitate - unless they can use an eraser now and then. By relying on eraser so much, we seem to have closed the feed-back loop that allows a child to learn from their 'not exactly correct' wanderings.
In our efforts to improve educational quality, somehow we have sent a clear signal of what is correct and acceptable. Children are reacting to it by relying more on erasure. Will they ever learn to get things correct in first place, or draw lines confidently ?
I remember there used to be a transition in school when we were supposed to give up pencils and start using pens around standard 4th and I remember it being a proud thing --- "I can now use pen". Is that not the case now? How about asking students to use pens instead of pencils and rendering that eraser useless (except for the drawing class, I guess).
ReplyDeleteWe start ink-pen writing in Class V - and as you said students are very eager to write with an ink-pen.
ReplyDeleteHowever, addiction to erasure is strong and they haven't really learned to write well-thought out sentences. Now they use erasers for writing in ink-pen as well, with the result that the written work is even more dirty.
Erasers are actually promoting muddled thinking - results in muddled writing.
wow! an example of how new advances in technology/material science kill human abilities!
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