KALABURAGI: Learning can be a colourful experience especially if it is with rangoli. An educational institution in Kalaburagi is doing just that. In a district known to lag behind in education, a government high school at Vijayanagar area in Kalaburagi, for the first time, is experimenting in imparting lessons to students through rangolis with the objective of helping them score at least pass marks in the upcoming SSLC exams.
All the 68 SSLC students — 26 boys and 42 girls — studying in this high school can draw rangolis on different subjects easily. Mathematics teacher Vishwanath Kattimani says the students have shown keen interest in drawing rangolis pertaining to Mathematics, Social Studies, Science, English and Kannada subjects and are learning better than in regular classes.
Kattimani says he visited many schools across the state and studied how to draw the interest of students towards learning. It was then that he got the idea of using rangoli art to help students to score more marks and did some studies. During the teachers’ meeting last December, he demonstrated his idea and requested teachers of other subjects to use rangoli art to teach their subject.
Enthused by the idea, the school authorities decided to impart coaching through rangoli during the evening special classes while regular coaching continued during the morning special classes. The free coaching classes are conducted for 45 minutes each from 9.30 am to 10.15 am and again from 4.30 pm to 5.15 pm. The teachers drew rangolis of their subjects with dots and lines and asked the students to draw them in their notebooks.
A few days ago, the school even organised a ‘Rangoli Jatra’ in the school in which all the students were given the chance to show their talent in drawing rangoli on SSLC subjects.
During the regular classes, the students are taught how to draw diagrams of Science, Mathematics and Social Science (maps) in their notebooks. In the special classes, the students are asked to draw the same diagrams in rangoli. The teachers can assess how much the students have grasped their lessons by looking at the rangolis.
Giving an example, Kattimani said if the students draw the diagram of the ear in rangoli, it will depict all the parts of the ear. Drawing rangolis helps students memorise their lessons and recollect it well, he points out. In the last mock test conducted in the last week of February, 95 per cent of the students studying in the school passed, Kattimani claimed.
Social Science teacher Surekha Jadhav said that 5 marks are set aside for drawing maps. Drawing maps in rangoli also helps the students in writing answers to questions related to the map. “We train the average students to get pass marks. Rangoli is the perfect tool for learning to draw diagrams and maps,” she said.
In-charge headmaster Basavaraj Ratkal said the school has never got less than 60% result in the last five years. “This experiment can help in increasing the success rate by up to 75%,” he felt.
How Marks are Calculated
In Mathematics, students are allotted 12 marks for diagrams and have to score another 16 marks to pass. In Science, they have to draw pictures for 16 marks and answer questions for 12 marks. In Social Studies, 5 marks are allotted for drawing maps and they have to score 23 marks more to pass.