Initiation of Aquatic Garden 2022

 

GET BACK TO YOUR PAPER TIME

Time is the only dimension that man has fought and failed yesterday, today and most likely in the future as well. It remains a bitter fact that no human on earth goes past a day in their lives without lamenting over the spilt time and on how fast the clock ticks. And of all, teachers are meant to deal with the worst dilemma – to practice and suggest tricks on how to tame time. Our old notions on time management seems not to work in the present scenario. It’s time to reflect, rethink and reconstruct our strategies to check the pace with the days pass, like sheets of a book caught in the wind. The duration of one hour is still sixty minutes and we have not been given a notice yet that a day is cut short to 20 hours. Yet what is it that makes us cry ‘No Time’ always! 

The answer lies in how we spend it. If we feel the days getting shorter and time elusive like never before then it definitely has something to do with our lifestyle and to be more specific with our screen time. We see warnings on the harms that overt use of screens can cause to the mind and body with great awe, the irony being the warnings appear in the blue lit background – the screens. Avoiding inconvenient facts is not a very diplomatic stand to adopt and so is overlooking the deterioration in human intellect with the glasses of improved educational or living standards. Artificial intelligence is not a topic of the future. Our seats are already taken. Real life has left the podium and the virtual world reigns the stage.  The learning culture has fallen far behind what it used to be once. Many of the students in the schools and colleges now follows a dishearteningly deleterious trend not just in their academics but in their very precious lives – having no goals, no dreams, no commitments and only momentary emotions. To motivate and inspire, there needs to be an ember in their minds but their eyes cry out the lifelessness in their youthful physique. It’s time to bring our youth back to the blue skies and green fields of reality surpassing the hideous screen monster.

The teaching fraternity is responsible to go beyond their mundane teaching chores and to reach out for their students stumbling in the blue light. We ought to teach them what the real learning experience is and the easiest path to this is to go back to the paper time of the past. The crippled argument that mobile phones are study aids and make learning fun needs to be vandalized. They do not make learning easier but make distractions easier. I wouldn’t attempt to shame the convenience and revolution that technology has brought about in the field of education. The point I am trying to make is that making the students walk into the virtual world (that is not a sole place for information alone) without a hand guide wouldn’t nurture the learning process. 

The wise use of a resource is not only defined by having access to it but by having the prudence to turn a blind eye to the irrelevant contents in it. The term necessary evil doesn’t fit in for the mobile phones for students instead it’s an avoidable evil as far as the true learning culture is concerned. Learning is a comprehensive activity of mind, brain and body. Watching a video and witnessing a real incident is different; reading an e – book and reading a textbook is different; typing notes and writing notes are different and these differences are what sets the boundary between gathering information and learning. It’s a sad realization that the new generation is unaware of these differences. We need to ponder on how smart our kids have become with the smart classes and e – lectures. 

The little steps that teachers could adopt would definitely make a difference. Encourage the use of textbooks instead of e – books, libraries instead of websites and written notes instead of printed notes. Show them the path to feel the ecstasy of learning and teach them to keep their screens out of their reach while studying. Yes, let’s go back to the paper time.  

© Anita Joy