March Monster

March Monster

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After New Year and Makara Sankranthi celebrations are over,all houses have begun to wear a serious look.Exam schedule is Fear grips the parents and kids in February itself.

March comes with a big bang giving red carpet welcome to the darling monster Examination.followed by a battery of entrance exam and results therof, which are supposed to decide the future of every child.

Dear Exam,you are eternal.From time immemorial you have proved your worth in correcting amazing astronomical facts,culling out the literary abilities of renouned poets and Vedic scholars .Even Rama and Arjuna were not exempted.They faced tests to win Sita and Draupathi..

But where has your honour disappeared?You are being picturised as a monster causing threat and fear. You are blamed to exert undue pressure on children and parents alike..Over ambitious parents set high unreasonable goals on their kids and the grip is too fierce to handle.

Charges levied against you are grave.You are blamed to be the culprit behind the increasing trend of suicides.We see lot of advertisements from 'counselling' heads who seem to make hay while the sun shines.Even the really brilliant top performers end up in self harm,.You are scorned and condemned as a curse by everyone.

How pathetic!

Scores and scores of advice have been dinned into the students about avoiding eleventh hour mugging up,systematic preparation, taking healthy food, taking sufficient breaks etc. etc.Everyone is tired of such sermons.

Dear Parents,to your child’s mind, these situations are genuinely threatening. And even perceived threats can create a real nervous system response.

Perhaps parents may stop reassuring the child and highlight that worrying is somewhat normal and has a purpose behind.

Worry is a protection mechanism. It can help protect us, and everyone experiences it from time to time. Children should avoid avoiding everything that causes anxiety.The situations may better be broken into manageable bits..

Some 50 years back a mother of five kids didn’t suffer as much tension as the modern mother of a single child.

Despite her best intentions, the mother may find herself transmitting her own stress to her child. The first thing is not to get bogged down by guilt and the second thing is not to pass her anxiety on to her child.It can be very difficult to communicate a sense of calm to her child when she herself is struggling to cope with her own anxiety. The only way to face the monster is to direct the parents’ anxiety,especially that of educated mothers,simultaneously scaffolding the child’s stress tolerance.

Dear parents, a lot of us would like to move mountains, but do nothing to practise on small hills. Fear about the fearful is more fearful .Let your children realise that failure is a part of life.Marks and ranks are not the be all and end all in life and convince them about the career options to middle and low performers too.

Unknowingly all of us are subjecting ourselves to various examinations from cradle to coffin. Exams do not stop with board/college level.There are entrance tests,interviews,annual assessments by superiors inclusive of self assessment at workplaces,maximisation of achievable targets year after year.The puzzles and conflicts may relate to choice of career plans,getting into wedlocks,financial commitments etc..

Every match for the sportsman,every performance for the artist,

every election for the politician,every dinner for the cook,

the treatment of each patient for the doctor, -all are real life examinations tagged with

success/failure.

Not to talk of patients who undergo clinical examination and await the results
anxiously praying for the absence of dreadful ailments.
There is no dearth of such eventful examinations.

Then why at all we should make so much fuss about examinations in educational institutions?Why can’t they be treated as rehearsals for the future?

“The more you try to avoid suffering,the more you suffer because small and
more insignificant things begin to torture you in proportion to your fear of
being hurt.”-Thomas Merton.

Examination is the brain child of ancient seers of India and it needs updation
and refinement depending on the present needs. But setting aside the basic
principles of assessment for fear of challenges or failure is an injustice to the educational development.At some stage chaff has to be separated from the grain.

The purpose of examination as a motivator and assessor can never be compromised under the pretext of anxiety, fear, peer prejudice,high set parental ambition etc . There are many more exams, testing situations for which no results are announced and sometimes the result itself is in the form of another test.There are exams with unannounced results to be carried over to the next birth.Then why to fear exam?

Dear Examination,you are not a monster, but a blessing.

Jayasala 42