The Supreme Court's order on ‘Samacheer Kalvi Thittam' (Uniform System of School Education) on Tuesday has raised many questions, one of them being how schools will manage for the next one month until textbooks reach them.
A majority of the schools are concerned about completing the class X syllabus, which they say will take a beating with the delay in starting the academic year as well as getting the books.
“If we are to follow the old textbooks, then the government should consider reducing the syllabus for class X. Mathematics, especially, is vast and for schools that start their academic year in June, it takes time up to November to complete the portion,” said a Mathematics teacher of a private school in Chennai.
The first term of the new academic year has already been delayed with schools being asked to extend their reopening date. Many schools think the unexpected holidays generally declared during monsoon would delay the academic year further. Teachers say the situation also has to be explained to parents. But it is not going to be easy for an education system where textbooks are central to learning. Academics, however, think it is an opportunity for teachers to look beyond the basic framework of the syllabus and develop the creativity of students in different traits. And with technology, there should be no paucity of finding ways to keep the classroom engaged. Studies have also said that conceptual learning best happens through student-teacher interaction, experiments in the science labs and through oral skills, say educationists. The School Education Department has asked the Directorate of Teacher Education Research and Training (DTERT) to prepare a report on how to hold classes without using text, for circulation among all schools.
There are learning systems that are not too dependent on textbooks. “Textbooks make teachers myopic as they confine themselves to what the books say. This is an opportunity for them to showcase their creative skills,” says Padma Srinath, primary school teacher, American International School. “Teachers with the help of students should try creating textbooks, with their own content. Vocabulary exercises, language skills, enacting a play… should be explored in the classroom,” she says, adding that teachers should discover the joy of doing things together. Storybooks should be brought in to cover the language demand of every class.
For high school students, practical lessons can be dealt in the labs. A few school heads note that as a small percentage of syllabi is common in all the four streams, teachers can continue teaching from books and lesson plans that they been using. While there are many lessons to be learnt in such a situation, parents feel education should be free of politics. As T.K. Shanmugam, parent of an SSLC student in Krishnagiri, says, “Politics should not come in the way of the future of students.''
