So last week I happened to see the report card of a student who had applied to GGIS for grade 2. And the report ran into more than 10 pages. It had like all these fancy pie-charts and bar graphs and all kinds of “insights” you could think of.
And I was really intrigued by it. So I asked the parent how the school dealt with the report ie how do they help the child in areas where he needed help and sure there we many such areas.
The parents were blank and just said- nothing much the school works in the same manner after giving the report as it did before
and there, I saw the paralysis of education.
You see, imagine you got a body checkup or a blood test done and you got these fancy 18-page reports that are so famous nowadays telling you about body components you never knew existed!
Now, what if they just gave you the report and not the prescription on what meds to take or changes to make in your lifestyle! How silly would that be? It is another story about whether you would make changes after getting the report or not but let’s leave that aside for now.
Coming back to education; this is what happens, we over analyze and complicate teaching and learning and we are sold a “new” and “fancy” “solution” that will help us understand and analyze our students better.
But actually, they don’t. Because teachers rarely get the time to work on the problem. You see the next more sophisticated test awaits.
Thankfully we keep testing to a minimum at GGIS in primary years. And we NEVER create a fuss about it. It allows us more time with the student because isn’t it be much better to just have caring teachers as role models for children?
This way students learn so much more from them. We may not be able to dish out a fancy report always but it sure would be FAAAAR better than just having a report and not doing anything about it.
What do you say?
Do share your views and let’s take this conversation further.
