Things have really changed in school since pre-pandemic times.
Instead of whooping in delight, students were visibly crestfallen when they heard that they need not come to school till the beginning of the summer vacation, as their classes would be held online yet again.
It turned out that they had planned a literary quiz and a programme to celebrate World Dance Day and they were looking forward to a live audience after a very long time. But Nature and Life have been teaching them a few hard lessons. Nature can strike any time in the shape of a fearsome pandemic or in the form of intense heat — never mind a thundershower or two. In other words, it is futile to plan as life has suddenly become more uncertain than it has ever been and therefore impossibly unpredictable.
The new school year began on April 8 and after rejoicing at the prospect of teaching real children in real classrooms we soon recognised the fact that a long struggle was ahead of us — the struggle with the aftermath of the pandemic.
Our students have forgotten many of the basic things they knew and many of the basic behavioural skills they had acquired over the years, simply because they have been out of practice. Some of these include walking along the corridors without blocking the passage, packing and unpacking their school bags, ascending and descending stairs smoothly and using the washroom responsibly.
Their attention span has suffered tremendously and they have lost the discipline of being confined in a classroom for a sustained period. The comforts of home are missing and alas they cannot snack all the time.
So far as their academic skills are concerned, they have forgotten how to write legibly, how to ask and answer questions clearly and to focus on the topic being discussed.
Their social skills seem to have disappeared and they are strangely awkward with their peers whom they have only seen on screen in the last two years.
How are we going to get our students to relearn all these skills as well as cover the syllabus for the new session in the course of the year?
Each day and indeed every period has become doubly valuable and we were just about beginning to see signs of our children getting back into a kind of rhythm when a ‘relapse’ hit us very hard and we sensed a kind of déjà vu. It is back to the hopelessly inadequate online teaching and learning for the next ten days. This time the cause was intense heat and the few thundershowers were not felt to have helped — schools have to close their campuses yet again, except for the examinees who are busy writing their board exams.
We teachers are feeling a kind of hopelessness and we are in a stunned state of in-action.
Once the summer vacation begins, we cannot call back the children early as they had made travel plans well in advance. So, one way of making up for lost time is closed. Students are due back in mid-June, but what if the second half of June is hotter than May? We looked up our records and found that we had to close school because of the summer heat one year, as late as June 21. The monsoons have also become unpredictable. In the last few years, the government has taken cognizance of the heat and has been sending out regular notifications to schools.
There is good reason for us teachers to be apprehensive about meeting our educational goals. And we have good reason to feel apprehensive about the future. Life has indeed changed for us.
Devi Kar
Devi Kar is director of Modern High School for Girls