Eight-year-old Roha seemed very upset at school and home with her mother kept on asking the reason. She refused to eat lunch after reaching home and went to sleep. Probably that was the only way of escape she could think of. The C Grade in English was the reason behind her stress. It is too much of a stress for a young innocent mind to face shame, insult and discouragement all fired at her simultaneously. The results were handed out in the class and all the children compared it with one another. She felt embarrassed and faced shaming remarks by her class fellows. They all are too young to understand the depth and impact of words. All they know is the grades labelled as good and bad.
A mother of a two-grader shared how her jaw dropped in shock when her daughter told her about poor grades of her class fellows and asked can she be a still friend with her? The grade phobia is passed on to kids and each one is suppose to function in a robotic manner. Researchers have found three consistent effects of using and emphasising numerical or alphabetical grades:
n Grades tend to reduce student’s interest in studies
n Grades tend to reduce students preference for challenging tasks, the more pressure to get A, the less challenging task they tend to pick.
n Grades reduce the quality of thinking. In one series of studies it was found that those students who were given qualitative feedback but no numerical grades did better than those who received grades
Children are individuals and different in their strengths. This system is manmade and prone to miscalculations. Mostly assessment results instead of mailing home or giving to parents/guardians are distributed in classroom. The A-grader is labelled as good and C is labelled as an incapable child.
I still remember when my 5th grader daughter’s teacher told her that she would be a failure in science. The only thing I told her was that don’t believe in teacher’s assessment; believe in yourself and the very same year she scored 100% in science. If teacher cherry-picks students on the basis of grades and ignores the rest of the class, she/he will ultimately face Newton’s law. Every action has a reaction that too with more force. The students soon start to detach from themselves from teacher and class, stops responding and participating.
If self-esteem and big egos inside little bodies are bulldozed then the zest and spark is bulldozed too. Encouragement does more and correction does less.
One of my students grabbed first position in an inter-school recital competition; I still cannot forget the gratitude phone call by her parents, “She was labelled as an average shy child since Montessori; we cannot thank you enough as it is the first time ever that she got selected, encouraged and emerged as a winner,” they said. There was no rocket science in it, just a simple one on one contact with the students, talking to them, knowing their interest and exploring them is more exciting than just asking them to copy the work from class board.
Marks, grades and results should be delivered in a peculiar manner avoiding comparisons and cynical labelling. They are at such an impressionable age where they learn to perceive themselves what they are told. A robotic copy and board work is not the criteria to estimate something as complex as human brain.
The whole onus cannot be put on the teachers as the school administration overburdens them. On average, a teacher takes more than 25 classes per week. Loaded with school copies to check, paperwork and then extra classes, it drains their energies and the core of student -teacher relationship.
Character building, emotional independence, reading habits, creativity, nurturing a hobby, cycle of duty and rights, values and self belief need to be discussed and emphasised upon. It will ultimately nurture a stronger and responsible student capable of better learning.
Many students remain in self-perceived iron cage of under estimation. Early labelling of being a laggard and lack of encouragement put them in this spiral. The human mind is a natural resource and we have to create favourable circumstances where it can nurture and grow. As Joseph Campbell said that “the job of an educator is to teach students to see vitality in themselves”.
The writer is a children’s right activist and a former educationist