Good marathi movie
Yesterday, I saw a really good marathi movie, Dahavhi Pha (which means 10th grade, division F). You can read reviews on the net somewhere, but the movie tries to shed some light on the harsh conditions under which students from poor families study and some flaws in the current education system in Maharashtra. The movie has tried to couple these two issues, but in my opinion, they are really two independent things. Is it fair to compare a student who can afford private tuitions and is literally spoon-fed so that he can concentrate on his studies, and a student who has to work before school and cannot afford tuitions? And secondly, how much do your grades in the exams reflect your intellect? The answers are negative in both cases.
Its a mad-mad race in the 10th and 12th grade; a race to get as good marks as possible by any means, so that you can get admissions to the best school when you pursue your engineering or medicine or whatever. And extremists are abundant. I have heard of parents giving up their jobs and spending full-time on helping their children prepare for the exam. Moderation is out of question. There's coaching classes, test series, vacation batches, arrr..its outrageous. But then, is it really? Not all schools have good teachers, and school don't cover the entire portion. That leaves coaching classes as the only option. However, what's bad is the form of the exam, where you literally have to cram up entire sections of books and spit them out on the answer sheet. That is especially true for subjects like chemistry, history, physics, and geography. However, that does not help much in languages and maths, so you have to really think and understand things there. In math, an alternative is to solve a huge number of problems. But thats similar to cramming. As I remember, the only subjects for which I did some thinking in the 10th grade were maths, English, and Marathi.
Things change in 11th and 12th grade. Cramming doesn't help that much, you really need to understand whats going on. And as I remember, the exams in the 12th grade were much more problem oriented, so you really had to analyze things and think. For me, that was the time when I started developing analytical skills and trying to understanding things instead of accepting them blindly. Lucky for me, I didn't have to study biology, which again involves cramming. So, 12th exams were much better than 10th ones IMHO.
Things changed again in engineering, where time to time, we had subjects for which we didn't have good teachers to teach the fundamentals and some of us restored to cramming again :(. I remember friends who would really study half of the portion, and cram up the rest of it. For example, in the database course, we had all the basic database stuff in say 70% of the syllabus, and the later portions would be crap like JDBC and oracle or something like that, things that you won't understand and would have to cram up. I remember that many times I didn't study or even look at those kind of things: stuff that was not really important for the subject, and skipping that wouldn't hamper your understanding, but you would probably lose some marks. I used to take the risk, and did lose marks sometimes, but at that point I had really lost the interest and the ability to cram up and spit out things. Anyway, I did finish my engineering like that, and with decent grades I may add.
One last thing I have to mention is the importance of good teachers. I am fortunate enough to have had some very good teachers than encouraged me to pursue my interests. As a kid, I was not a very good student I remember. The school I went to was not really the best schools like St. Vincents etc, so there weren't many bright students there. And even in that school, my class rank used to be 14th or something like that. But I distinctly remember that on one day when our final results were out, my class teacher, Mrs Pai, made a remark that I am careless. I guess that instigated me to study better and in the next exam I was 4th or 5th in my class, which was a total surprise for me. And in the 7th grade, Mrs Pelapkar used to teach us science and maths, and she found out that I was interested in science, and encouraged me to participate in science fares. I was still weak in maths and that was taken care of by my mom and my sister I remember. But the most influential teacher I had was our maths teacher at Sudhir's coaching class in 11th std. Its so pathetic I can't even remember his name. But he was the one who really helped develop my mathematical, analytical, and problem solving skills. Next time I go go to India, I will surely drop by and atleast say hello to him...
Anyway..enough of my rambling.
Its a mad-mad race in the 10th and 12th grade; a race to get as good marks as possible by any means, so that you can get admissions to the best school when you pursue your engineering or medicine or whatever. And extremists are abundant. I have heard of parents giving up their jobs and spending full-time on helping their children prepare for the exam. Moderation is out of question. There's coaching classes, test series, vacation batches, arrr..its outrageous. But then, is it really? Not all schools have good teachers, and school don't cover the entire portion. That leaves coaching classes as the only option. However, what's bad is the form of the exam, where you literally have to cram up entire sections of books and spit them out on the answer sheet. That is especially true for subjects like chemistry, history, physics, and geography. However, that does not help much in languages and maths, so you have to really think and understand things there. In math, an alternative is to solve a huge number of problems. But thats similar to cramming. As I remember, the only subjects for which I did some thinking in the 10th grade were maths, English, and Marathi.
Things change in 11th and 12th grade. Cramming doesn't help that much, you really need to understand whats going on. And as I remember, the exams in the 12th grade were much more problem oriented, so you really had to analyze things and think. For me, that was the time when I started developing analytical skills and trying to understanding things instead of accepting them blindly. Lucky for me, I didn't have to study biology, which again involves cramming. So, 12th exams were much better than 10th ones IMHO.
Things changed again in engineering, where time to time, we had subjects for which we didn't have good teachers to teach the fundamentals and some of us restored to cramming again :(. I remember friends who would really study half of the portion, and cram up the rest of it. For example, in the database course, we had all the basic database stuff in say 70% of the syllabus, and the later portions would be crap like JDBC and oracle or something like that, things that you won't understand and would have to cram up. I remember that many times I didn't study or even look at those kind of things: stuff that was not really important for the subject, and skipping that wouldn't hamper your understanding, but you would probably lose some marks. I used to take the risk, and did lose marks sometimes, but at that point I had really lost the interest and the ability to cram up and spit out things. Anyway, I did finish my engineering like that, and with decent grades I may add.
One last thing I have to mention is the importance of good teachers. I am fortunate enough to have had some very good teachers than encouraged me to pursue my interests. As a kid, I was not a very good student I remember. The school I went to was not really the best schools like St. Vincents etc, so there weren't many bright students there. And even in that school, my class rank used to be 14th or something like that. But I distinctly remember that on one day when our final results were out, my class teacher, Mrs Pai, made a remark that I am careless. I guess that instigated me to study better and in the next exam I was 4th or 5th in my class, which was a total surprise for me. And in the 7th grade, Mrs Pelapkar used to teach us science and maths, and she found out that I was interested in science, and encouraged me to participate in science fares. I was still weak in maths and that was taken care of by my mom and my sister I remember. But the most influential teacher I had was our maths teacher at Sudhir's coaching class in 11th std. Its so pathetic I can't even remember his name. But he was the one who really helped develop my mathematical, analytical, and problem solving skills. Next time I go go to India, I will surely drop by and atleast say hello to him...
Anyway..enough of my rambling.
posted by Rahul at 11:17 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home