It is eleven pm, the clock's silent ticking and my son's pencil scratching the paper is all i can hear. Back from a tiring shift in office, i droop and wake again, only to find the poor fellow writing ba+ee= beeeeeee....snore....wake up girl...Home work- how much do we hate it? My childhood days too were filled with thick rimmed spectacle wearing teachers and voluminous assignments. My trysts with homework started long back in my Kinder Garden ( what a funny name for a place where kindness is scarce!) I must have written B-A-T and A-N-T so many times, i had nightmares remembering the spellings of bat and ant. If i had started writing blogs then, i would have written 10000000000...posts by now!
The education system has taught us to write home works in abundance and understand nothing! I could blindly recite any verse in Thirukkural ( Tamil literary work) without an inkling of what it meant. My memory was school-famous! I could memorize random numbers in any order and repeat without missing a single digit. That was how home works changed me- Mugging Queen. I thought the world had changed in twenty years since i left school and was in for a rude shock. My son is now slowly taking up my post...psttttt. Mother used to spend hours together with us, which made me wonder- why is she up all night pestering me to complete homework? Alas! History repeats now, as i half-sit and half-sleep on the couch as my son writes his homework. Poor chap! If he were lucky enough, he would have been my brother or classmate, enjoyed the little happiness left with veteran homework jugglers.
Fun went around everywhere with us, whether we played hide and seek or cooked rice with eeny wheeny little pots. L Junior doesn't know any game other than chess and scrabble or his silly video games. Children these days probably write more homework than PhD's research work! Every time i watch the nimble fingers holding the pencil struggling, i hate it. I hate it that we keep watching as our little ones lose every ounce of their happiness and childhood. After all, it is their childhood and we treat them as if they are Engineers and Doctors! We lecture them about responsibility, sincerity and obedience, trying to instill our long forgotten dreams as their own.The personal space they must have of their own- the scribblings of rockets and planes on little pieces of paper, the tables written on walls, the soap bubbles floating all around- all these....are they the property of an elder generation?
It is quite absurd to watch little ones role play as professionals- we are creating a phoney generation who have no imagination, no creativity and no pastime that can be fruitful. How sick! And those teachers who give tonnes of home works- if i were the Education Minister, i would have flogged them on their thick hides. Or better, we can publicly lash them for punishing the kids. Ahhhhh...it is getting better now...We can give them imposition, let them write the loooooooooooongest answer 100 times in a single evening! And let us feed the home works to the dogs. Oh, they too wouldn't sniff it...
L Junior keeps peeping at what i blog right now. When he read the title I could sense a wicked chuckle and a twinkle in the corner of his eye! Thank Heavens, there is little innocence and childhood left in him!!!
The education system has taught us to write home works in abundance and understand nothing! I could blindly recite any verse in Thirukkural ( Tamil literary work) without an inkling of what it meant. My memory was school-famous! I could memorize random numbers in any order and repeat without missing a single digit. That was how home works changed me- Mugging Queen. I thought the world had changed in twenty years since i left school and was in for a rude shock. My son is now slowly taking up my post...psttttt. Mother used to spend hours together with us, which made me wonder- why is she up all night pestering me to complete homework? Alas! History repeats now, as i half-sit and half-sleep on the couch as my son writes his homework. Poor chap! If he were lucky enough, he would have been my brother or classmate, enjoyed the little happiness left with veteran homework jugglers.
Fun went around everywhere with us, whether we played hide and seek or cooked rice with eeny wheeny little pots. L Junior doesn't know any game other than chess and scrabble or his silly video games. Children these days probably write more homework than PhD's research work! Every time i watch the nimble fingers holding the pencil struggling, i hate it. I hate it that we keep watching as our little ones lose every ounce of their happiness and childhood. After all, it is their childhood and we treat them as if they are Engineers and Doctors! We lecture them about responsibility, sincerity and obedience, trying to instill our long forgotten dreams as their own.The personal space they must have of their own- the scribblings of rockets and planes on little pieces of paper, the tables written on walls, the soap bubbles floating all around- all these....are they the property of an elder generation?
It is quite absurd to watch little ones role play as professionals- we are creating a phoney generation who have no imagination, no creativity and no pastime that can be fruitful. How sick! And those teachers who give tonnes of home works- if i were the Education Minister, i would have flogged them on their thick hides. Or better, we can publicly lash them for punishing the kids. Ahhhhh...it is getting better now...We can give them imposition, let them write the loooooooooooongest answer 100 times in a single evening! And let us feed the home works to the dogs. Oh, they too wouldn't sniff it...
hehe its so sweet to kno a mom thinks dis wayyy! :)
ReplyDeleteMy dog refused to eat it...hahahaha!!! True, this is what education is left to being all about today, so very sad but true...
ReplyDeleteYou are definitely a blogger after my own heart sister!...TELL THEM! Too much homework does not equal understanding!..i help my kids do theirs, when they get tired of writing! when would teachers know that class work is MORE important than pile of homeworks that one atimes go to the internet to look for answers??!!...THEY SHOULD LET CHILDREN BE CHILDREN! ADULTHOOD has too much problems of it's own!
ReplyDeleteI also did not like doing homework, but after I came into engineering line, I did miss that. Because, that, if not anything, kept me practiced on a regular basis. At least then teachers checked most of it, if not all. Now all they do is put a tick mark, most of them.
ReplyDeleteI see it as an important part of the education system because not every one has an iron will to revise everything on a day to day basis. :)
Cheers,
Blasphemous Aesthete
Dear Sadiya....awwwwww...i always feel sorry for my son when he writes too much of homework:( Thanks for the comment
ReplyDeleteHey Arti, thanks for the comment. Glad you liked the post.
ReplyDeleteDear Ibhade, great compliments from you. Agreed, childhood is to be spent happily, not brooding over piles of homework!
Dear Blasphemous Aesthete, i like to revise portions on a daily basis, so you can call me iron- willed. So it just is annoying because writing too much of homework spoils the quality study time my son gets! Thanks for the comment, dude!
ReplyDeleteInteresting read,, i put up the same msg to the school teacher of my kid.. she said..like .. they have to complete say 4 units in a day..whic they cant rush thru.. so they dump kids with stern work outs...so teachers wer nt the ones to b blamed..
ReplyDeleteAnd reg. child's play .. surely its nt childs play.. nw a days .. i dont find kidoos playing child games like CoCo,Hide and skid,Fire in the mountain,etc etc whic wer all of our child-hood days.. we can see them only on some schools sports meet(nt in streets or colonies).. so nw the parents and the society general stake the claim..
rgds