On my way to Colombo I pass a girls’ school. Lots of little girls. Are they really happy going to school. In generally are the students of state owned schools happy and satisfied? I’m in doubt. When I was schooling there were a lot of stuff which I hate.
Unnecessary meetings and assemblies
Imagine a set of little children, standing in bright daylight, listening to something which does not interest them. Some faint and there friends take them to a shelter. They are forced to listen to unnecessary stuff, maybe about a victory of a drama team, the bowling performance of a school guy or may be about the great service done by a retiring teacher whome they have not seen before. The only thing I found interesting at a meeting was the speech done by the principal, who was a short and sweet speaker kind enough to finish his speech within minutes. All the other items which followed were scrap.
The frequency of these type of public assemblies should be limited as much as possible. (Thanks to the security situation we were able to get rid from these types of assemblies during the last days of our school life. The defence dudes warned school guys not to do public assemblies. But now the war is over and I’m afraid assemblies are assembled again!). Why not use the Public Address System (the speakers which are mounted at every class room) to say these things to the children so they can sit on their little chairs and listen to the important notices. When unnecessary stuff is being said, a brave teacher can switch off the speaker and continue his lesson!
Using children to clean the class rooms
Classrooms become dirty everyday. In almost every class the students are grouped into five groups to do the cleaning. The girls or boys who have to clean the class on a specific day should come early and do the cleaning. This is not a pleasant activity. Most of these children are not familiar with these kinds of work because there parents don’t ask them to do sweeping and cleaning. When you sweep a typical classroom with a broomstick you get covered with dust and things become more troublesome when the little dudes have to collect this dirt and put it into a dustbin. If you didn’t do the cleaning there is a possibility that your teacher will hit you with her cane. The dirtiest part of this story is that there are some guys who do not care about cleaning, so the boy or girl who is mostly afraid of the teacher has to do this cleaning alone, believe me, it had been really hard!
The schools should hire workers to do cleaning. They collect thousands of money from the students as fascility fees, security fees and etc. If it is not enough the ammi’s and tha-thi’s of these children will willingly pay extra money.
Monitor Trouble
Class monitors are the mostly troubled dudes in a school as I feel. Cleaning the classroom is one burden they have. The teachers say that the monitors should inspect this cleaning procedure but the other guys do not obey these class monitors. It is a very troublesome exercise to go to a roudy guy and say “Hey man! You have to clean the class today. Go now and do that!!
Monitors have more troubles. Imagine a situation where there is no teacher in a class room and the children are shouting and doing mischief. Then a teacher of a neighboring class comes in and asks two questions.
- Who is your teacher?
- Who is the monitor of this class?
The first person is of course not there. But the second person is always there. So he/she is caught and perhaps slapped… Poor guy..what shoud he do for the absence of the teacher and is he responsible for the noise of all the other students? In my school life I have seen a handful of situations where monitors were punished because the other guys were shouting. A well experienced monitor will have a solution for this problem. He shall maintain a list of the names of the shouting guys and submit it to the invader. But how practical that is?
