23/01/2024
A new attempt with innovative pedagogy:
No doubt every pedagogy has been tried and attempted at and there will be nothing innovative but I think some something though not newer in whole may have something new in it.
Teaching an 8th standard student an English poem titled "Prayer for Strength"
I did simply read the poem along with the kid to repeat it twice while doing so I didn't tell any word meaning or anything else. I just made the kid to read the glossary followed to réad the questions following it. After reading the language work my kid just to my expectations asked me why i didn't tell the meaning etc. Still I didn't reply her answer but in my imagination I was just exploring that if this is the 4th lesson of the book and we have already attempted every learning skill with previous three lessons, can now the student make some attempts to reply some questions like to do it's grammar work, can answer the structure of sentences and shall be able to tell the clauses, tense, nouns, verbs, punctuation marks, narrative, theme of the poem, rhyme scheme, repetitions word antonym/synonyms/ homophone/ and so on. If student can reply or do even 15% of all this then only our previous teaching learning experiences with three lessons have worked. May be I might not be 100% right and many may differ from my narrative but I still believe that we should make the students inquisitive, tempt them to ask as many questions even though they being the silliest ones, let them do many things themselves, make them write the words, play with the verbs, search for comparatives, and superlatives and write answers for questions themselves and encourage them even if the answers they write are not fit. I think this way putting such efforts in just 5-6 lessons of the language book will help a great deal while dealing with future lessons. For a book on language like Tulip Series on English we should do justice with teaching the students the language like the language is taught as English being a foreign language to us, we have to make things happen like it, students can at read, write, understand, speak and communicate in the language we are attempting at. It is not going through the traditional way of letting students rote the things and read the language book like a science book. I know an 8th standard student may have several cranial limitations and s/he can't become a fluent speaker and great writer of the foreign language but let it be a start so that till 10th standard students becomes independent in understanding things provided to him/her in a language which s/he has been learning since his/her LKG class!
