Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Come board exams time, there is the usual criticism of all the pressure being heaped on students, and how many of them are unable to cope with it. Manika Ghosh criticizes the government “solution” to this issue. Sure, it’s a new solution each year, but the common thread across the years? “It appears to be a grandiose, knee-jerk idea at best for solving a complex, multidimensional problem.” All this reminds me of this experiment from Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance , wherein the narrator decides to do away with grades in a college course that he teaches. What follows is very revealing not just about the universities and schools but also teachers and the holy cow that cannot be criticized, at least not publicly: students. Let’s start with how a gradeless system is scary for universities and schools: “The real University is a state of mind… There’s a legal entity which is unfortunately called by the same name but is quite another thing… It is just...

In 1 st standard, my daughter has monthly tests, not exams. That means less content per cycle, but it also means the cycles are frequent. No wonder then that my daughter feels that barely have I stopped “troubling her” (her take on what we are doing to her life) for one round of tests that I am back for the next round. One time she tried telling me that she didn’t want to be a “studies champion”, only a “sports champion”. I’ve found that convincing a kid to do better at studies is very tough. I blame the grades system for this. At least with the good old marks system, even with a score of 99, one knew there was a little room for improvement. Not so with grades. When my daughter makes a mistake and I tell her to work harder next time, here are some of the arguments she has thrown back at me: -          “I will get an A+ even if I make one mistake.” -          “If I got an A+, it means my m’am is ha...