Adnan the eager child.

Adnan's father , Mansoor came up to  me to ask if i could teach  him Kannada.  My first reply was NO...my thoughts are running like 'may be the child has no interest in the subject  and these parents are impossible, they ll do anything, not enough that child has to do it in school now they wont stop there , they want additional tutions for this subject pah! poor child... but wait a minute.. i asked myself...if i knew better then i could help the child get the barriers off..so i called and said yes i would help Adnan


Next day he came home...we started with a small chat, he showed me his book and i saw on every Kannada word he had written the sound of the word in English.   I asked him whats with kannada and him assuming he hated the subject...he looked at me and said "this language is tough".  " If you dont like something then it would seem tough" i said.  He immediately said  "no i like this subject only that i dont know how to read."  there were moments of silence........ my whole outlook changed...my assumptions about the whole issue just melted away...i saw that child had eager eyes, i began to see the concern Mansoor had.  If i was in his place i would  have done the same with my child.

There was no time to lose, the child was ready and i was even more ready.. the bridge between the alphabets and their sounds had to be built..i began charting out the map on the paper...i asked him if he recognizes the letters , he said only a few.   I said OK that is a good start, gave him my 7yr old daughters beginners book and said " write any two things that you like".  He asked " in Kannada?"  I said "yes, the script will be Kannada but choose your words...he said " gum" and he looked at me with a weird expression...i shifted my eyes to the paper .. he hesitantly put the pencil to the paper and wrote 'gum' in Kannada script., then another word , then one more , then the pace increased .... we began putting down peoples names..objects, and anything we could think of... we were running back and forth into that Kannada book to find which sound looks like that alphabet..until we wrote over 20 -25 words... we looked at each other and laughed at our work.

I said "the class today is over do you want to come in tomorrow??" He said " yes.. do i have homework?"   I said "choose what you want to do"... he said  "can i write a line from my Harry potter book in Kannada script and bring it over???"   i smiled....

DAY 2  - He came back saying he had not done any homework ...but what i saw on his face was .'.i m gonna have some more fun look'...he had not brought his Kannada book either.  When i asked him where his book was he shook his head and shrugged his shoulders.. and said " its in the car"  We stared at the new note book he had brought along .  To break the silence i said write 4 lines on something you like in English...he wrote about his favorite teacher, we rewrote the same in Kannada script.  I said " if you went to a restaurant to eat pizzas and nobody knew any other language other than Kannada, how would you manage?"   He began expressing in the few words of Kannada he knew...i asked him to start penning them down too.. so he began writing small sentences ..he kept looking at me for support for all those words that needed to make a sentence..and what i was smiling about was that he forgot the struggle he had finding the alphabets that made those sounds on the first day!!!!!!!!!!!...the alphabets became words with ease, it already was a secondary concern it seemed.... children are miracles and always keep me awe to what they "can" do when left to
themselves...I m loving this.....

DAY - 3
Just could not take up to do a write up of the day 3..he had not turned up for this 3rd day class....a headache, his day at school was exhausting, there was too much homework to do that evening were his excuses.  When he was here the next day, I thought sharing would be a good idea.  So i asked him if he would want to say anything he was feeling at that moment.  He got accountable for not coming and not doing what he said he would do as part of our class work.  I rephrased my question to ask about his feelings not his accountability.  There was a long pause and he told me some of his experiences at school, and shared some of his friends and what he plays with them, the moments that made him happy, the games he loved and i listened.  What did not leave my mind was that the children are whacked on their palms with a wooden scale by their teachers if they do not obey in the classroom. And this i heard is a known school not any small school. What kind of education are we putting our children through?  I still struggle to make choices in my life.  We are routed through rote learning , i feel the ones who broke free from them are the ones who contributed to themselves and others....

We are taught maths with no application of value of money, how it grows, and it takes us half a life time to figure where we could invest ourselves and our money.  How many of us knew -,  borrowing money, repaying money, investing it first - then you spend from your investments, saving money... to get to the bottom line is money management taken seriously at school..???

What about the other subjects.. it was taught to us but did we learn it like we remember it , apply it??..if the learning had happened as aid to life then probably so many years of my life would have been different.  It mostly happened like we are preparing for life and guess what ?... i m preparing all the time...it is not life itself yet..my choices are so difficult to make, it has to be approved by someone else other than me, then it is usually considered good...the teachers always gave us grades to tell us how good we were and that still remains imbibed in me .  I m seldom the master of my choice.  It has taken me so long to understand this and now it is going to take time to unlearn and to practice the new ways to have the results i want in my life...