I get so stressed when I have to write an official letter/email. It takes me ages to compose a 4 line letter. It is not because I don’t know English, It is just that I find it so difficult to write what is in my head in a correct form and manner without making any grammatical mistakes.
Even simple things like emailing the parents of my children’s basket ball team to let them know when the next game, would take me an hour to compose. I know a son of an English professor who still gets she/he mixed up ( he was the top student in his class). Surely I shouldn’t be so hard on myself having studied in Malayalam medium. But I do feel miserable when my colleagues can write a letter just like that and send it off , while I am still thinking of the salutations.
When I was growing up I was taught to write a leave letter, query to the publisher of a book and a thank you letter. You got full marks, if you wrote the letter the exactly how the teacher wrote and with my eidetic memory it wasn’t very hard to get 100% marks. But I wish the education dept/school/teacher/me understood how important it would be for a student in her/his future to learn to write a decent letter on their own. ( I found it first hand when I had to write referal letters during my internship. Mine was always a two liner that included patient’s diagnosis and please do the needful !)
Even now, children of my cousin learn pre written essays ( written by my cousin!), just so they would get 100% marks. I tried to tell my cousin how detrimental this rot learning would be to his children’s future and my cousin thinks that I am suffering from acute case of jealousy and just don’t want his kids to get good marks !
Yaya has a persuasive essay to submit this week and few days ago she told me
“Mom, I am thinking of writing my essay on child abuse”
And I thought that is a good topic. Honestly, I was proud of myself. Our dinner time always included talking about Gay rights, child abuse etc. And I felt my child wanted to talk about child abuse because I made it a point to discuss all those topics. ( one brownie point for the mom! )
Yesterday when I picked her up after her guitar lessons, she told me ” Mom, I decided that I am not going to write about child abuse because everyone knows it is wrong and there is no counter argument, instead I am going to write about ‘mandatory reporting of child abuse’ because sometimes a wrong reporting can break up a family or perhaps some of the children are better off in their own home than in a foster care even if there are minor abuses in their own home”
When Yaya told me that she was going to write about child abuse, I didn’t know to think about counter argument. I never wrote any essays in my life. And I couldn’t help my child.
Fortunately my children don’t really need my help. But I wish I wasn’t this stupid and I really wish my education didn’t give me the short end of the stick.
i regularly swing between helping my child score the grades and let him swim on his own… how i wish i could just let go.. and be proud a t the not so good attempt than the “ratta maar”
Shabs: Most Indian children are at least bilingual..and I have always felt that if you are fluent in languages, you are intelligent. Yet look at the contribution to science by Indians? We are still talking about Aryabhata or C V Raman..The people of the era where rot learning wasn’t popular. There will never be any hope to see an Indian, born and raised in India in the world stage of science/mathmematics, so long as the parents don’t encourage the children to develop their thinking skills. Rot learning will never teach you to think. Rot learning passes the message from the text book/parent written essays to the exam paper,bypassing the child’s intellectual development..There is no discovery without intellectual development.
Growing up, I was considered very intelligent by everyone – teachers, fellow students,… And I have the marks to show it. But in reality, I dont think I am better han anyone else. The only difference was that I didnt learn anything by heart. My mother stopped teaching me in second standard – she had to teach my brother, and didnt have the time. i had to learn by myself, and somehow I picked up learning the proper way.
unlimitedrandomthoughts: Amma didn’t teach me either, not because she was teaching my siblings, but because she was never there when we grew up. She was busy going to kochi from kottayam because the fish was cheap there or visiting friends/relatives to boast about her kids. She was never home. Lucky you that you learned the right way, I wish I had learned things the right way instead of mugging up everything.
With your memory, may be it worked. I found it really difficult to learn anything byheart. I always lost marks since I didn’t mug up poems properly (I would know the beginning and the end, and would write the rest of the poem myself), and in catechism class where I had to mug up bible sentences.