Viswanathan K's Thoughts

I have great sympathy for the teachers of kids my daughter’s generation. After all, these Gen Z kids (born between 1997 and 2012) consider themselves to be peers of everyone – their parents, their teachers – and treat all those folks with the same derisiveness. This drives parents up a wall (and worse), but those teachers have to suffer this fate at the hands of so many kids. Plus, while parental love can help tide over such treatment, what about the poor teacher? It turns out the teachers have found ways to cope with such, er, abuse. ~~   Now that my daughter has entered the feared board exam year (10 th ), the teachers try to, er, motivate the kids by telling them that they are going to end up on the streets, so it is time to shape up.   One kid responded to this (separately, out of class) pointing out that she lived in a 4 BHK, had a Mercedes, so she was definitely not homeless. Upon which a classmate cheerfully corrected her saying that the teacher’s comment wasn’t about h...

Sarcasm. Play on words. All these are lost on kids whose English is beyond pathetic. Which, by the sound of it, includes my 11 yo daughter’s entire class. Herself included.   I guess her English teacher learnt that lesson the time one kid in class announced, “I bred my dog and it had 8 babies”. Upon which the teacher asked, “You’re saying you had 8 babies?”. The kid just stared at her with that did-I-say-anything-like-that look on his face.   Of course, any such claim by one kid only sets off counter claims. Another kid scoffed at the first kid and declared, “So what? I bred my hamsters and they had babies too”. The teacher tried again, “You had babies?”. “No”, replied the kid, “The hamsters did”. This time, the teacher tried a different tack, “Oh! I got confused because you look like a hamster”. A direct insult – this all the kids understood.   When I was teaching my daughter computer programming for her school exam, I told her that she should check the prog...

My mom will often talk about the purpose of education being to widen a student’s horizons. Coming from a science background, I never understood what that even meant, let alone whether it was being achieved! After all, the laws of physics applied to the universe; the principles of engineering governed how you built things: those are facts; where’s the horizon widening in that, I wondered? Two recent incidents made me finally understand what she said probably only applied in the non-science streams. The first one was what a colleague of mine who studied economics in the US told about this professor of his. The professor believed that rule of law was a necessary (but not sufficient) criteria for a country to get rich. This being the US, he would then give a provocative example: Israel and Palestine. The former had the rule of law; the latter didn’t. Of course, the debate would then become a political brawl but the original topic would still get argued over indirectly… The se...

Plenty of students, ex-students, parents and corporations complain about the education system. The poor quality of teachers. The ways things are taught. And how what’s taught is of little relevance at the workplace. But where exactly does the fault lie? And what could be the solution? Do many teachers lack in-depth subject knowledge? Absolutely. But why is it so? That’s easy. They are not paid well. Certainly not the kind of salaries that would attract the experts in any field. So you pay them peanuts, then expect the smartest people to sign up, to stay motivated, and to find ways to make the subject interesting? Get real! You get what you pay for. So why not increase their salaries? Easier said than done. Everyone, including the middle class and the rich, complains whenever a fee hike is proposed. The government even forces private schools to get parents to agree to fee hikes. Like that’s ever going to happen. If school fees have to be kept low, the money to run a school or col...