It has been a while since I have made my last post. The truth is that I have gone on to a new job position and that has come with a great deal of responsibility and work. I have been enjoying doing work since the satisfaction that comes with doing something useful really has no parallel. I have been entrusted with, among many things, the task of creating concept notes and blue prints for the future schools and centres that would be established in the new campus of the university that I am now working having taken lien from my old position with my previous employer. Thinking and working out new concepts that will probably have some effect on the new campus of my present employer has been like an elixir of life with plenty to look forward to. The sun has been shining and not very hot. So you are wondering why I am singing paeans of joy in the post while the title of the post itself is so gloomy. I assure you I have not lost my mind or my senses, it is just that from the setting that I have just described I have rudely been brought back to a situation where I see dark clouds gathering around the silver lining that I had been seeing. If you have to understand me better then you must know a story; one that is true in every single detail.
I have a niece who is now writing her Board Exams for the tenth standard, a significant point in a student's life in India. The girl has a problem; she simply hates studies and anything to do with it. Since it is the tenth standard her parents were concerned and with good reason about how her education would pan out. Their concern and the girl's complete lack of it had become a source of perennial conflict between her and her parents which only made the parents desperate still. It was into this situation that I was catapulted and somehow found myself telling the parents that she could come and stay with me since my mother is still actively a maths teacher and I myself am capable of some teaching in various subjects.
The whole thing has been a roller coaster ride for me since I found the girl to be quite stubborn, distracted and prone to throwing horrible temper tantrums. I am not very good at handling this and after trying gamely to instill some discipline in the girl I lost the plot and told her that I would only help her if she had any specific doubts and I also conveyed my decision to the parents with the disclaimer that if they chose to keep her with me and if she failed in her exams that will not have anything to do with me. Despite my issuing this disclaimer, for reasons best known to themselves the parents decided to leave the child under my care. Before I had conveyed my decision to her parents, I regularly felt all the symptoms of nervousness which vanished once I told them what I had to. So for the past couple of months the attitude has been live and let live.
This arrangement suited the girl fine who would very occasionally approach me with some doubts, I suspect with the intention to just keep me happy. But I did get to see how she studied. Her text books looked brand new and untouched by anyone. The only book that she referred to was this thing called "All in one". My curiosity piqued I once looked into the book and was horrified to find that it was nothing but a compilation of questions and answers to those questions. The question compilation was apparently of various questions that have appeared in the past years and there was greater emphasis on those that appeared more frequently than others. For sometime now I have been claiming that the schools in Andhra Pradesh have formed into a syndicate and that they provide question banks to the Board of Secondary Education and that every year questions are chosen from that bank. The existence of this compendium is the proof of this conspiracy theory of mine being bang on the mark. For many days I lamented the fact that this level of rubbish was what school education was reduced to before the euphoria of my own work took me away from this.
The Board exams began on the 26th of March and my niece has shown no nervousness nor any determination to study. In fact, she has been so relaxed that she has been reading Asterix comics and my Calvin and Hobbes collection even on the days that preceded an examination. She has also been chatting on the phone with friends on the phone organizing picnics that they would go to after the exams, planning movies and how they could get tickets and reach the theatres and things of that nature. I was well and truly flummoxed when I noticed the perseverance of the same course of action by the girl before her bug bears, the maths and science exams. And everyday the girl comes home with a glint in the eye and face radiating happiness. Unable to contain my curiosity anymore I directly confronted the girl and asked her how she was doing in her exams. My interrogation was met with some mirth and merriment and the answer was that she was doing well and that 90% is guaranteed. I know for a fact that she knows nothing and I also know that she has not been studying at all. So I asked her if she was copying to which her reply was a resounding 'yes'. Even though I was horrified I still persisted with questioning and asked her why she was so sure that the person she was copying from was writing the correct answers and what came as the reply shocked even cynic like me. She said that her invigilators were dictating answers not just to her but the whole class!!!! And this in a school which is not even the one where she studies (to ensure that there will be no help from teachers during the exam the Board jumbles up students and sends them to other schools for writing the exams). When I asked her if she was telling me the truth the girl was quite adamant that she was.
The question that kept bugging me endlessly is why would teachers who do not even know the students they are invigilating dictate answers to them? I therefore decided to find out more and from other students who were taking the exams, I set about asking the sons, daughters, nephews and nieces if this was a universal practice. Apparently it is and has been for a few years now. All the parents are aware of this. Quite a few even had theories about why this was happening. I will list out the theories:
1. Most schools in Hyderabad are run by managements from coastal Andhra and since the separate Telangana agitation is on, they fear reprisals and are therefore doing this.
2. Goons from various Telangana political outfits are threatening schools and invigilators with dire consequences since they (the outfits) would be held responsible since the academic years are getting disturbed for the past couple of years due to the agitations that they launch.
3. Parents have been demanding that their wards be helped in this way so that they do not get left behind in the race for marks and that this is a standard practice in Coastal Andhra and only now did the Telangana people realize the beauty of manipulating the system this way.
4. Schools have formed cartels. The jumbling of students happens in a set area and the schools in order to maintain their 100% pass statistics have decided to come together and bail each other out.
5. Teachers take money from rich parents but since they cannot selectively help only some (then they would get caught out as having taken money from so and so) they have decided to extend their largesse to all students.
6. The Government in order to avoid a backlash from unhappy students and parents has issued instructions orally to perpetuate this practice.
There may have been a few more of these theories but I cannot seem to recollect them now. To me it is not important why this practice is perpetuated. It is more important that it is being perpetuated and through the perpetuation the education system and the values that it should stand for are being methodically dismantled. All these years I have lamented that students were only being trained to pass exams but now I have realized even that crutch was a false one in the first place. Now, even though, I am teacher, I have lost complete hope and interest in this thing called education.
"We don't know need no education,
We don't need no thought control,
No dark sarcasm in the class room,
Teacher leave them kids alone".
Those are lines of a lyric written by my favourite poet and musician Roger Waters. He wrote them in a different context though. But somehow they seem to be as applicable to this context, the one that I am referring to. God bless our children and God save this country. Amen.
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