In today's non-overtly-competitive educational environment, children get graded (based on mark bands) for their performance in assessments. Most often, grades are only made available to parents and are not shared with the children. No mark-based class ranks.
Therefore, no real anxiety and/or seriousness towards "assessments". No anxiety is good. No seriousness?
Let me explain. When marks are lost due to careless mistakes or overlooking things that a child *does* know -- it makes little difference to the child. The typical reaction in a non-marks-hyped environment is "so what?"
That's as far as the child is concerned. But ... how does this impact people around the child? Most importantly -- how do teachers react? Teachers who have been in the field from before the "new-age" schools became popular find it hard to let go of the judge-the-child-by-the-written-word syndrome. They continue to put tremendous emphasis on the written word -- using it as the final benchmark to judge the child.
When will our education system truly change to embrace the child for what he or she is instead of beating around the written-word bush?
There are two issues here
ReplyDelete1. The seriousness issue gets resolved and very quickly goes to the other extreme where kids by themselves become over competitive and sensitive about loosing marks/grades.
2. About teachers' attitude/education system - only way this will change is if there is aptitude in the teachers to learn and be open to accept a different perspective. And for this to happen we need people with aptitude to get into teaching, and schools have to give a larger share of the fees they collect from us to train and recruit good teachers... Will this happen, it wont. So we parents have to get creative and teach our kids 1. How to write normally and 2. How to write answers to score better grade....