BENGALURU: The boys’ new academic year at school has commenced. Instead of the usual back-to-school routine which involves picking up school supplies, trying on last year’s shoes to see if we can squeeze a few more months out of them, and a last-minute scramble to see which bits of uniform we keep, which ones we pass on and which ones get turned into kitchen towels, this year consisted of only one thing. We ordered two new Chrome books.
The day before school started, I had a wobble. How was this going to be? Should I take the day off to settle them in to their lessons? Were they going to be okay? My fears were founded on a series of articles, forwards, videos and memes I’d consumed throughout the summer about the horrors of online school. The chaos, the technical glitches, the burnout. The next morning, the kids were at their laptops, they logged in and met their friends, greeted their old teachers and tried to suss out the new ones via small squares on Google Meet. They started the day with mindfulness, had breaks in between for snack and lunch and even dribbled their footballs and did jumping jacks.
It seemed to be going okay. We did have a few wobbles here and there. The younger one didn’t want to see his friends like this. He wanted to SEE them. The older one cribbed a little about not being able to chat with his friends during class. But by and large they seemed okay. As the days progressed, they settled down into this new normal. As parents on WhatsApp groups around me worried about syllabus sharing and textbooks and homework and whether the kids were doing enough or too much or too little, I had to keep reminding myself how privileged we were that these were the extent of our concerns for our children’s education. An article on an online news platform cited that only ‘8 per cent of all households with members aged between five and 24 have both a computer and an Internet connection’ in India while only 24 per cent of homes have a smartphone.
The article also points out that while smartphones are fine for learning apps they aren’t suited for longer lessons or further reading. The numbers sharply bring into perspective how lucky a very small percentage of our children are in being able to even have an education to look forward to in the next year. Instead of worrying about if there’s enough homework, and how will they cover the entire syllabus like this and is this teacher too strict, let’s step away from the computers and leave our children to it, shall we? We didn’t sit next to them in their classroom before, so why should we sit next to them now? Parents, stay out of the classrooms and let the teachers take over. Our role over the next few months and possibly year is to keep an eye on our children for mental wobbles, stress and anxiety and do what we can to alleviate them. We are lucky that is the worst of our problems as parents. They are not issues to take lightly, but they are not insurmountable.
Menaka Raman
The writer’s philosophy is: if there’s no blood, don’t call me