Bojjandi is really my last baby and while on the one hand I grieve that he’s already one year old, on the other hand, I can’t help enjoying each and every minute of his growing up. Much more than either of the other two, perhaps because he is the last or because I have chosen to take a break from a much-hated workplace, I am able to enjoy each and every antic, each stage of his growing up and my sense of marvel at the human brain only grows.
Two weeks before his first birthday, Bojji took his first staggering steps, about two of them, in between my mum and me, and then fell about, flailing arms and legs. Just ten days back, he walked like a high-wire artist strung miles above the ground, arms akimbo and body swaying from side to side perilously. Now he’s not just walking but trying to run all over the house on his stumpy bow-legs and flat little feet. The only time he crawls is when he knows speed is of the essence, i.e. the nano-second that the door to the staircase or front door is open so he can practice his Houdini act. He’s walking splay-legged all the way from the backyard through the kitchen and into the living room, even pausing mid-stride to stoop and pick up something he’s not supposed to and pop it into his mouth, and then carry on with his perambulations!
The other day, when he was walking out of the dining room, I thought I’d surprise him and shout out a Boo! I did and for a split second his face froze in surprise and then he broke into a delighted chuckle. What astonished me a minute later was that he went back into the dining room, waited for me to walk in and boo-ed me in turn! I just find it amazing how their tiny little brains churn and process the amazing world around them and then figure out what they should do and when and how.
He’s also made progress in talking, and can call out A’s name in the sweetest voice possible. He also learned to say mama three days ago and it never fails to get him a hug from me. He knows his thatha very well and any time he spots him, starts saying thatha, at first softly and then more and more loudly until thatha turns and picks him up and plays with him. He is extremely interactive and now is good company for anyone, between his crazy antics, his habit of dancing to The Wheels of the Bus and the various games he likes to play.
All in all, every time I look at him, I can’t help but be glad for the accident and God’s grand design which gave us this wonderful gift.
Showing posts with label children and learning. Show all posts
Showing posts with label children and learning. Show all posts
Monday, October 26, 2009
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
The Learning Instinct
Okay, had planned a mushy post on A for our anniversary today but am now not feeling the mush because of various reasons so here’s another post that I have wanting to put up for the longest time.
Puddi had been wanting to go to school for quite a while. Every morning, when all of us sailed off to school or work, she’d peer disconsolately down at us from the verandah, and plaintively demand to go to school. I wanted to enroll her in a parent-child program but knew I couldn’t go with her at such a heavily pregnant stage. So finally we enrolled her in playschool in November, after Bojjandi was born. It’s a new playschool but run by the same teachers who taught Chubbocks at playschool and we knew she’d really benefit from them.
She’s been going twice a week since November now, so it’s just about 14 classes or so – about 28 hours of school. She started out as this clingy little child who never got off A’s lap during class and didn’t open her mouth. But now she’s participating with gusto, requesting her favourite song during music time, speaking up to name the colour, shape or alphabet of the day. On the days she has school, she starts clamouring to go right from early morning. She replicates all the activities they perform in school throughout the day, be it singing the songs, the learning games or the ‘clean-up time’ song. What’s amazing is that we’ve never bothered speaking English to her – I speak to her in Kannada and A in Hindi – but just because the playschool is conducted in English, she’s been picking up so much of the language.
From a child who usually spoke in Hindi or Kannada, she’s begun composing long sentences in English. One can almost see the wheels in her mind turning as she gropes for the right word to express whatever she wants to say. It’s a joy to watch her blossoming and to experience how her mind is expanding. The more she learns – be it at playschool or from my mom who seems to have an inborn instinct for teaching little kids – the more she enjoys it and the more she wants to learn.
Chubbocks is similar – if there’s anything he gets interested in, he just goes after the subject, wanting to absorb information like a little sponge. He has a passion for dinosaurs, which started with A bringing him a movie called Dinosaur, and now he’s made us buy him several books on Dinos. He spends all his free time drawing different types of dinosaurs, reads up on them, knows the names of several different varieties and his latest ambition is to become a paleontologist. Earlier his passion was for tornadoes and again he loved going through a book which explained the phenomenon, asking us questions and discussing them until he understood the concept. Of course, if he’s asked to do any of this as a task assigned by us, he just doesn’t get up the enthusiasm – every time I’ve asked him to read in the afternoon, he’s either turned around and fallen asleep or chosen to spend his time drawing!
Watching these two and several of Chubbocks friends, whom I’ve known since they were all in playschool together, I come back to the conclusion that the learning instinct is inborn in human beings. Animals operate on pure instinct and nearly all their knowledge is inherited, but human beings are remarkable in that we come equipped only with the learning instinct. After that, it’s left to circumstance and later on one’s own inclinations, as to what and how much each one of us learns.
Unfortunately, that means that for those of us not fortunate enough to be born in the middle class at least, even this basic right is denied. The schools run by the government are so pitiful, the teaching level so pathetic even in the private schools, there is a complete lack of infrastructure by way of libraries or learning centers where thirsty little minds can drink in knowledge. And by and large the teaching methodology preferred is that of driving in what the teacher thinks it important for the child to know rather than stimulate the child’s curiosity and let it learn from a more wide-eyed and self-motivated perspective.
My friend’s daughter recently chose to take up IB, International Baccalaureate, at high school level because she was so bored of the commerce stream she had chosen. Ever since this girl started in the program, she has been so self-motivated even her own mother is surprised. She has to do several different projects for each course, they have interesting extracurriculars like drama workshops and model United Nations conferences, they have to prepare an independent paper, like a mini-thesis, for the course…it really equips children for a lifetime of learning. The traditional way Indian schools teach is intended to be useful only from the exam point of view – regurgitate and forget. And it invokes little desire in most people to continue a love-affair with learning. As for the children of the poor who really get the most unmotivated bunch of people teaching them for the most part, no wonder so many of them get bored and drop out of the system even when not forced to by the sheer need to earn a living.
One of my friends from college, Ravi, started up an NGO several years ago. He graduated from IIM A but his heart was never in the corporate sector and luckily, he realized where his vocation lay pretty early. So he set up in his own home, and started running tuition classes for the poor children who lived around – maths and English. As he went on, he realized that spoken English was a key requirement for them as even the brightest of them wouldn’t get a good job if he or she was unable to converse in English – sad but true. So he expanded to cover spoken English and later on, computers. Not programming but the use of basic Windows programs – Word, PowerPoint and Excel. Over time, he built up a base of more teachers – I helped him out for a couple of years when I lived closer to him – and had regular classes in batches. The biggest issue we struggled with was how to keep them interested and to help them built further on what they knew rather than starting each day as a blank slate. Ravi at least has managed to light the fire in many of the kids he helped, and now they want to study further and to run similar helping centers for other kids like them. But who helps out the rest of India?
Puddi had been wanting to go to school for quite a while. Every morning, when all of us sailed off to school or work, she’d peer disconsolately down at us from the verandah, and plaintively demand to go to school. I wanted to enroll her in a parent-child program but knew I couldn’t go with her at such a heavily pregnant stage. So finally we enrolled her in playschool in November, after Bojjandi was born. It’s a new playschool but run by the same teachers who taught Chubbocks at playschool and we knew she’d really benefit from them.
She’s been going twice a week since November now, so it’s just about 14 classes or so – about 28 hours of school. She started out as this clingy little child who never got off A’s lap during class and didn’t open her mouth. But now she’s participating with gusto, requesting her favourite song during music time, speaking up to name the colour, shape or alphabet of the day. On the days she has school, she starts clamouring to go right from early morning. She replicates all the activities they perform in school throughout the day, be it singing the songs, the learning games or the ‘clean-up time’ song. What’s amazing is that we’ve never bothered speaking English to her – I speak to her in Kannada and A in Hindi – but just because the playschool is conducted in English, she’s been picking up so much of the language.
From a child who usually spoke in Hindi or Kannada, she’s begun composing long sentences in English. One can almost see the wheels in her mind turning as she gropes for the right word to express whatever she wants to say. It’s a joy to watch her blossoming and to experience how her mind is expanding. The more she learns – be it at playschool or from my mom who seems to have an inborn instinct for teaching little kids – the more she enjoys it and the more she wants to learn.
Chubbocks is similar – if there’s anything he gets interested in, he just goes after the subject, wanting to absorb information like a little sponge. He has a passion for dinosaurs, which started with A bringing him a movie called Dinosaur, and now he’s made us buy him several books on Dinos. He spends all his free time drawing different types of dinosaurs, reads up on them, knows the names of several different varieties and his latest ambition is to become a paleontologist. Earlier his passion was for tornadoes and again he loved going through a book which explained the phenomenon, asking us questions and discussing them until he understood the concept. Of course, if he’s asked to do any of this as a task assigned by us, he just doesn’t get up the enthusiasm – every time I’ve asked him to read in the afternoon, he’s either turned around and fallen asleep or chosen to spend his time drawing!
Watching these two and several of Chubbocks friends, whom I’ve known since they were all in playschool together, I come back to the conclusion that the learning instinct is inborn in human beings. Animals operate on pure instinct and nearly all their knowledge is inherited, but human beings are remarkable in that we come equipped only with the learning instinct. After that, it’s left to circumstance and later on one’s own inclinations, as to what and how much each one of us learns.
Unfortunately, that means that for those of us not fortunate enough to be born in the middle class at least, even this basic right is denied. The schools run by the government are so pitiful, the teaching level so pathetic even in the private schools, there is a complete lack of infrastructure by way of libraries or learning centers where thirsty little minds can drink in knowledge. And by and large the teaching methodology preferred is that of driving in what the teacher thinks it important for the child to know rather than stimulate the child’s curiosity and let it learn from a more wide-eyed and self-motivated perspective.
My friend’s daughter recently chose to take up IB, International Baccalaureate, at high school level because she was so bored of the commerce stream she had chosen. Ever since this girl started in the program, she has been so self-motivated even her own mother is surprised. She has to do several different projects for each course, they have interesting extracurriculars like drama workshops and model United Nations conferences, they have to prepare an independent paper, like a mini-thesis, for the course…it really equips children for a lifetime of learning. The traditional way Indian schools teach is intended to be useful only from the exam point of view – regurgitate and forget. And it invokes little desire in most people to continue a love-affair with learning. As for the children of the poor who really get the most unmotivated bunch of people teaching them for the most part, no wonder so many of them get bored and drop out of the system even when not forced to by the sheer need to earn a living.
One of my friends from college, Ravi, started up an NGO several years ago. He graduated from IIM A but his heart was never in the corporate sector and luckily, he realized where his vocation lay pretty early. So he set up in his own home, and started running tuition classes for the poor children who lived around – maths and English. As he went on, he realized that spoken English was a key requirement for them as even the brightest of them wouldn’t get a good job if he or she was unable to converse in English – sad but true. So he expanded to cover spoken English and later on, computers. Not programming but the use of basic Windows programs – Word, PowerPoint and Excel. Over time, he built up a base of more teachers – I helped him out for a couple of years when I lived closer to him – and had regular classes in batches. The biggest issue we struggled with was how to keep them interested and to help them built further on what they knew rather than starting each day as a blank slate. Ravi at least has managed to light the fire in many of the kids he helped, and now they want to study further and to run similar helping centers for other kids like them. But who helps out the rest of India?
Friday, January 25, 2008
Puds again - the learning curve
As I said recently, Puddi is going through an amazing learning journey and whenever we have the time to stop and watch, we can only marvel at how ingenuous her tiny little brain is. Last evening, Puddi marched out into the kitchen to play her favourite game of climbing on and off the low plastic stool we keep there. Shortly thereafter, she marched back into the family room with the stool in her arms. She carefully put it down in front of the toy cupboard.
The toy cupboard is an ancient cupboard we wheedled from my parents and has a front that is half glass and half wooden panels. The kids toy collection has long outgrown the cupboard and so their stuff is just piled higgledy-piggledy wherever we've found space on the shelves so it's become more a catchall than a cupboard. So anyway, Puddi hoisted her body onto the stool, doing all kinds of acrobatics on the way which made me certain she was going to tumble right off any second ( I do have some pictures which I'll post up later).
Having finally figured out how to climb and then stay on the stool without falling, she turned and stared gravely into the glass-fronted half of the cupboard. Then, she reached up her tiny hands to the latch which was firmly shut and struggled to manipulate it. That's when A and I realised that she had a definite plan hatched out and that was why she had gone and fetched the stool from the kitchen in the first place!
Eventually the latch proved too tight and also just out of her reach despite her standing on tiptoes to try and reach it so I opened the cupboard door for her. Madam instantly got in front of the open door and thoughtfully regarded each and every shelf. "Kya chahiya, what do you want?" I asked. "Ball..."
I took a look at the cupboard but didn't see any ball there. I remembered she had rolled a ball under the futon in the morning and thought she was talking about that, so A got on his hands and knees and dug it out for her. I pointed it out and said, "See - ball". Puddi shook her head - No. I pointed to a tiger in the cupboard and asked if she wanted that. She waved that away imperiously.
Finally she got onto her haunches, to be able to see the bottom shelves better, dug deep into the cupboard and triumphantly emerged with the toy she had been looking for - Chubbocks's toy robot. She tends to call all toys 'ball' but in her mind had been perfectly clear about what she wanted, and made sure she got it too!
The toy cupboard is an ancient cupboard we wheedled from my parents and has a front that is half glass and half wooden panels. The kids toy collection has long outgrown the cupboard and so their stuff is just piled higgledy-piggledy wherever we've found space on the shelves so it's become more a catchall than a cupboard. So anyway, Puddi hoisted her body onto the stool, doing all kinds of acrobatics on the way which made me certain she was going to tumble right off any second ( I do have some pictures which I'll post up later).
Having finally figured out how to climb and then stay on the stool without falling, she turned and stared gravely into the glass-fronted half of the cupboard. Then, she reached up her tiny hands to the latch which was firmly shut and struggled to manipulate it. That's when A and I realised that she had a definite plan hatched out and that was why she had gone and fetched the stool from the kitchen in the first place!
Eventually the latch proved too tight and also just out of her reach despite her standing on tiptoes to try and reach it so I opened the cupboard door for her. Madam instantly got in front of the open door and thoughtfully regarded each and every shelf. "Kya chahiya, what do you want?" I asked. "Ball..."I took a look at the cupboard but didn't see any ball there. I remembered she had rolled a ball under the futon in the morning and thought she was talking about that, so A got on his hands and knees and dug it out for her. I pointed it out and said, "See - ball". Puddi shook her head - No. I pointed to a tiger in the cupboard and asked if she wanted that. She waved that away imperiously.
Finally she got onto her haunches, to be able to see the bottom shelves better, dug deep into the cupboard and triumphantly emerged with the toy she had been looking for - Chubbocks's toy robot. She tends to call all toys 'ball' but in her mind had been perfectly clear about what she wanted, and made sure she got it too!
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