--------------------------------------------------------------------------- **** Annual Goanetters Meet **** ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Annual Goanetters Meet - January 3, 2012 - 12:30 - 2pm Tourist Hostel, near the Old Secretariat, Panaji (Panjim) Planning to attend? Send an email to eve...@goanet.org with contact details --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Today, whilst going home from the Goanetters meet, I ran into one of 'apro' Goan Catholic businessmen. This guy was huffing and puffing in the vicinity of Ruchik restaurant in Mapusa, which has of late become my favourite chai joint on account of its fine alumichi bhaji (Mushroom bhaji). This guy heaved a sigh of relief when he met me. "Tony, you're just the guy I wanted to meet." He said. To cut a long story short, he wanted to know the English name for the local medicinal herb "Kiraitem". I told him that to my knowledge, there was no English name for the herb, though there might be a botanical name which I was not aware of. So I asked him why he wanted the name, and his reply was that his daughter had a school assignment and she required a picture fo the kiraitem herb for the next day. This set me of on one of my pet peeves, the irrational assignments given by school teachers and how parents have to struggle to do the assignments for children. The objective of a school assignment is to enhance the learning experience, to evaluate knowledge, to encourage creativity, to encourage heuristic or self discovery principles in the student. So assignments should be well thought out and should be done by the students themselves and not by their parents or others. During my tenure of service, I was flabbergasted to find the staffroom of our school bursting at the seams with thermocole cutouts of various types of fishes. There were aharks and mackrels and sardines and lady fish and seer fish - you name them and they were present in the staffroom. So I asked one of the teachers in the staffroom what this was all about and she told me that x had given the children an assignment of making a thermocole fish and they were kept in the staffroom for evaluation. I then decided to take a fresh look at the assignment policy of the school and other schools. In course of my investigations, I came across some pretty ridiculous assignments. I also discovered a lot of the library books had been vandalized to provide pictures for assignments. So a new policy was collectively formulated: No thermocole assignments, no picture cutouts, no downloaded pictures. If pictures/ diagrams were required for an assignment, then they were to be drawn by the students and not assessed for drawing skills but for the factual information. In the case of my friend who was concerned with his daughters assignment, I suggested that since he was so close to the market where medicinal herbs are sold (Near the old cafe C D'Souza - opposite Dangui Opticians) he could actually buy a bunch of the dried herb and have his daughter mount it on a sheet of card paper - so much more valuable since the child would actually have better sensory perception of the plant - see, touch, smell then a mere picture. Now a days there is a new trend in assignments. Get information from the net. Teachers think it is a great idea to ask children to find information from the net whether the children have the ability to find things for themselves or not. As a result, children commission their parents or the cyber cafe operative to do their assignments. I know of several cyber cafes where you only have to tell the operative the class the subject and the topic and within a few minutes you have the assignment done. But then does this promote learning or does it merely help the cyber cafe owners make a better living? Should parents be so stressed out as to consider the assignment their child gets to be the be all and end all of their parental duties? A neighbour of mine is barely computer literate and she dotes over her son. So when the son who is in the seventh standard has an assignment on garbage in Goa and the children were supposed to get pictures, she came to me to ask me to help her get the pictures. Fine for the mother's learning. But what did it do for the son? Some book and chart publishers have prepared charts that deal with various assignments of various classes. Another silly trend is decorative assignments with ribbons, tassels, buttons and beads. Come on are we evaluating the ability of the child to decorate an assignment or are we evaluating the students knowledge? I suppose this is one of the dirty habits started by the 'city' and 'convent' schools and has spread like a cancer in the entire school community. Certain notions in Goa are hard to get rid of. Every parent in Goa is anxious of the child learning to read and write as soon as the child starts school. This is unmindful of the fact that pedagogues suggest that preschool and kindergarten is a time when children should develop motor skills and social skills. The activities should be centred more around play rather than serious learning. But parents insist that they learn to read and write - and are often boastful of their childrens' abilities to read and write. Thus we rob our childrens' childhoods. -- ** "Tony de Sa" < tonydesa at gmail dot com > ** --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Protect Goa's natural beauty Support Goa's first Tiger Reserve Sign the petition at: http://www.goanet.org/petition/petition.php ---------------------------------------------------------------------------