Ye kya kiya hai? Ye kaise bhul sakti hai tu? Yaad nai rehta hai? Ye kar liya hota to tere test mein atche marks nai aa jaate?
Hello and welcome to Musings of a MasterNi, I am Minal Desai and here I share with you a medley of my unique experiences shaped by students teachers and life in general.
So, what you just saw me just enact a while ago was something that I saw and was shaken by, just last Sunday. Last Sunday I was in a club in the city, a place for family gatherings and all that, and on my way out which is around 10 PM or something in the corridor where there are hundreds of people coming and going, I see this mother with a pile of books.
Now, my only impression of people sitting with a pile of books is teachers who are correcting. But actually it was a mother who was sitting with a pile of her child’s books with the child right beside her and she was trying to tell the child how did you lose these marks? What have you done wrong? She was trying to work with that child for some test and some marks. I saw all of this while passing by, it was hardly some 5 seconds and that scene still stays there and it is heart-wrenching. Because there were so many things I saw.
I saw this mother who for some reason seemed helpless though she was in power in that particular position I also saw immense pressure, I saw her trying to build a future for her child. I saw a mother trying to build something for the child that the child is hardly aware of because the child is hardly 6-7 years old, grade 1 or grade 2 child. She’s trying to do everything for the child, whether she’s doing it out of unmet expectations or she’s doing it out of peer pressure or anything else, I really don’t know. But I saw a harrowed mother who on a Sunday evening should not be doing that.
And then I saw the child, was she really paying attention to what the mother was saying, I guess not. Do you think a child, who has come to the club, who has come for probably a Sunday evening which is supposedly the family time, is interested in the books the mother is holding? Is she really interested in her marks at that moment? Does she even know what marks are? How many of us as adults remember our marks and does it really matter at this age?
But all this also takes me further to ask a larger than life question, why are we even doing this? Why are we subjecting our children to marks? Why are we subjecting the mothers to put their reputation and their existence on their child’s marks? Shouldn’t we have better yardsticks? Shouldn’t we be doing something better? Shouldn’t the children be in the park? Shouldn’t the test be non-existent for that age group?
I really don’t know the answers to these and appalling at so many levels that someone has to undergo this. But I still know that the same parent and the same society will even clap and adore these activities saying that “I used to even teach my child at 10 in the night.”
When we stake claims like that what are we really doing to our children?
And that is what I want to muse about today. I really don’t have anything besides the scene of that mother sitting in that corridor over there trying to get across to that child and failing at it. And we as a society failing with it altogether.
Well, have your seen such incidents and what has been your take and have you been able to see all these layers. If you have please do share them with me. I would love to hear from you and don’t forget to follow to Musings Of A MasterNi on Youtube and Instagram.
