LITTLE ANGELS' LIGHTS : MASTER GLOBAL ESSAY

 

LEARNING from an angel : My daughter - who is seven and a half, is my latest teacher. She is in grade two.

She gets a fair bit of homework and she is kind enough that she gets me to sit with her when she is doing her homework. I started sitting with her to see if she needed any help. But now I sit with her largely to learn from her.

MY DAUGHTER does not like making mistakes at all. She is embarrassed about them. Despite my best efforts, I have so far failed to explain to her the value of making mistakes in learning.

We learn a lot more from our mistakes than from our successes. But I have not been able to convince her of their value.

Once a mistake is made, the feelings of  embarrassment are so strong that she does not focus on understanding why she made the mistake so that she can learn from them more effectively.

She just corrects them and moves on. I wish schools and teachers would dwell on this more.  Our children should learn to not feel ashamed or embarrassed in making mistakes.

They should be risk takers who try their best but if a mistake is made, they can openly accept them and then use the opportunity to learn from them. I am struggling to get this across still and have to find the right vocabulary and concepts to explain this : my limitation.

It is fascinating to see her starting to make connections across concepts in the same subject and sometimes even across concepts coming from different subjects. Recently she connected addition and multiplication.

If questions in her homework are too easy for her, she just breezes through them and, I feel, does not learn much by doing them. If they are too difficult, she gets frustrated if she has to try very hard and long to get them.

This is especially true as she starts tiring. She is the happiest, sharpest and keenest when they are difficult enough to make her think but not too difficult so that she cannot get to the correct method for answering them. The hardest of the teacher dilemmas when setting questions!

And especially because a teacher has many students in the class, each at a different level of learning. How can one homework work for all? So, most days most questions fall in one or the other category and it is only a few that provide effective learning.

I am learning so much from my new teacher and I am fascinated by how her learning is taking place. I am sure most parents must be seeing the same process.

This great publishing continues. The World Students Society thanks Dr. Faisal Bari, a senior research fellow at the Institute of Development and Economic Alternatives, and an associate professor of economics at LUMS.