Time-pass

Ask anyone and they will agree that hardwork is boring, it's no fun. Let us just have a free-period they will say. Ironically, there comes a time when students crave for work and abhor time-pass. And we should make good use of these episodes.

We had series of events in school for a while now. Concerts, Presentations and Sport-days. Day one is fun, as children are happy to be out-of class-rooms and no-studies. These events, which require all classes to come together, invariably take-up a lot of time. Moving four hundred kids to do anything takes time. This creates opportunities for time-pass. You are either part of the drill or you are waiting out-side for your turn to come. That, mostly you are waiting. Soon children look bored and wasted. By the end of the day they look tired and rater disappointed. They sure don't want to go back to the class-rooms. But neither do they want this time-pass. Some of them even feel angry that so much time was whiled away.

Many children come to me and say they would want to go back to the class and study something. They were missing the class-work. This has happened more than once. These are the times when we can show them the difference between hard-work and time-pass.

I have been saying this in my classes, that you feel happy when you do hard-work. And however much you may want to enjoy, if  you do time-pass you will feel miserable at the end of the day.

I am glad that some of my classes are realizing this rather counter-intuitive thing. And are being vocal about it. Time-pass makes you unhappy at the end of the day, meaningful and engaging hard-work makes you happy at the end of the day.  

Dedication...

I have been promoting in my school that students should work without erasures. I find that children are addicted to erasures these days. Some teachers are listening to this. A Class-I teacher asked me to step-in her class where she is been practicing this for a while. So I sat through a number-names activity for couple of periods.

Firstly, age 5-6 yrs children should be considered entirely different species compared to middle school children. It's harder to teach kids this young; at least I don't have that talent. The task was to write five number-names (between 1 to 10). The teacher started by giving out worksheets and pencils. And a bowl-full of erasures were also kept in a corner, just in case someone wanted one. All were ready, with their pencils in hand.

As they got into the work, what struck me the most was how very dedicated they looked as they wrote. Each one was almost carving each letter systematically on to the line. No one looking here and there. The slow children took longer time, some children had wonderful hand some didn't. There seemed much larger spread in their abilities to write number-words. Yet, they had one thing in common, they were serious about getting it done well. They all were writing with absolute dedication.

I wished I could achieve that kind of focus on 'task at hand' in my middle school children. May be as children become aware of their own standing in rest of the class they tend to take the tasks lightly. Sometimes they do focus however as in this Class, the ability to put your mind to a single and simple task was amazing. One would want to preserve that attitude as children grow older. So that is what I learned in my visit to Class-I.

What about the erasures ? A few children did walk-up to the front to borrow the erasure, but most didn't. They were willing to work more diligently rather than rush for an erasure. Not having an erasure handy, may be, helped in focusing on the task. I don't know if this is wishful thinking, time should tell.

Update : This great dedicated teacher left the school recently. So the experiment couldn't go for long. Alas, that is how teaching and learning proceeds these days.