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?

Teachers

Saw TZP over the weekend ( review on We are like this only) which led us to reminisce about the teachers we had through school. It was a mixed bag - there were some who were truly inspiring, there were some who were lazy or boring or just plain cruel, and there were some who made you feel ten feet tall...

There was Mrs. Bhattacharya, who used to teach science or something. Quite the sadist, if she found that someone hadn't done their homework, she used to bang their head against the wall. Her nephew was in my section and used to come in for this treatment quite regularly. The Hindi teachers, way back in primary school, would give you poor marks if you expressed an honest opinion, as opposed to the 'ratta' answers they had dictated to each question.

Pankaj Sir - who taught maths - was known as Paan Chabau because of his habit of chewing paan, and woe betide you if you sat next to a window. Streams of paan would come flying past at any point of time during his class, and you were easily liable to get some red flecks on your white uniform. Our PE teacher, in line with the general trend in Delhi schools, had trouble with his English. Like an 'angrezon ke zamaane ke jailor', he used to divide the class into three halves. If you ever interrupted him in the middle of a conversation, he'd say, "I talk she talk, why you coming middle middle?" He also used to ask for windows to be opened so the climate could come in. He frequently made us do something which I still haven't figured out the real name for - 'Table cards' exercises!

Our maths teacher, Mrs. Kharbanda, loomed large in her stern glasses, plaited greying hair and rather colourful clothes. If you ever asked her a question, she would turn to the class toppers in Maths and ask them if they had understood. As soon as these toadies nodded yes, she'd turn back and say, "If they can understand, why can't you?", and rap you on the knuckles with a wooden ruler. I have a feeling that she was responsible not only for my fear of maths but my feeling, throughout my educational career, that I was not capable of understanding maths.

Mrs. Raman was our chemistry teacher from class 6. An extroverted, fast-talking Tam-Brahm, she really got us all excited about chemistry. She had a way of talking which would make the subject come alive. One of the weird things I remember from her class was a ghost story she narrated about someone who was driving down Purana Quila Road late at night in the winter and suddenly found a white film on the windscreen. When the wipers couldn't wipe it away, the chap got out to wipe it off himself and found it was just not going. Then he realised it was a supernatural presence and started reciting the Gayatri Mantra. The thing vanished and he drove home at a terrific speed. Funny mix of the arcane and the prove-able, eh?

Our English teacher in class 6 was Mrs. Chawla. She used to be stern, with cat-shaped glasses and her salt and pepper hair always in an immaculate French roll. She was no-nonsense and all of us used to be scared of her. One day, right after the exams, she called me up to the board and asked me tio wipe it clean. As I was doing so, she turned to the class and said, "This girl has done something I didn't think any of you were capable of." I froze in place, wondering what terrible thing I had done. She went on, "She has come first in all four sections in English, and scored over 70%." I was so relieved I hadn't committed any sacrilege that it took a while for the news to sink in. Our English teachers always used to be fun - young, excited about the subject and thrilled if they found someone who showed any signs of prowess.

I continued my love affair with English teachers through my years at American school too. There was Mrs. Morano - one of the original flower children, and I wouldn't be surprised if she'd gone to Woodstock. She taught Advanced English, and made us read Romeo and Juliet and A Separate Peace, The Catcher in the Rye and the Bible. She gave me a special assignment once to read and interpret part of Milton's Paradise Lost. Mrs. Banck was more easy-going and lots of fun, and again, passionate about her subject. She took us through Beowulf and Macbeth, Shakespearean sonnets and the Romantic poets. As a result of the English teachers I have had, I have always loved reading and writing and the analysis of literature - it seems like something that is necessary for a full life.

So much of who we become and what we enjoy gets shaped by our school days. The attitude of teachers towards each and every student is so important in shaping that person's view of himself or herself, in their self-esteem and how they perceive their own abilities. The impact of the school days and school teachers is lifelong. If only we as a society would recognise the criticality of the function they perform, and pay them fittingly for the influence they have on our children...