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Just let them be

Photo: R.V. Moorthy

Exam fever Avoid adding to your ward’s confusion

“My parents have been advising me day in and day out on how to fare better in exams,” complains Renuka, a tenth class student. “And the badgering has only increased now,” rues the harried girl. Children are told any number of times that exams are, especially for those preparing for the Secondary School Certificate exam, life-changers, career-builders and what not. With the onset of exam season, parents get that extra solicitous about their children’s performance in exams. “At school we put in extra hours besides listening to teachers’ exhortations. And when I come home, it’s the turn of parents.” She finally vents: “I am sick of it.”

Parents’ solicitousness is nothing new.

Children bombarded with advice by parents, teachers and well-wishers end up struggling to keep themselves calm before exams. In fact, their parents’ worry is getting transferred to them. “I have never worried about exams before,” says studious Sivarama Krishna and further adds: “But, seeing my parents worry about me is leaving me worried.” No doubt, children feel they are made to perform more for their parents than for their own. With the parents’ worry on one side, and the schools egging them on to score more marks, the children feel they got to run twice that faster to remain at the same place. Added to all this is peer-pressure.

Exams, most parents and teachers believe, are the measure of student’s intelligence, and his/her own idea of self-esteem. Turning the performance in an exam into some kind of end-of-the-world scenario hurts children who may not be good at all subjects. “I don’t like to spend more time to read Social Studies,” says Tarun. “I don’t feel like studying it and so I may not score good marks in it,” he bemoans, as he pretty well knows it’s going to affect his overall score. What comes through this is children get more talked-to or talked-at rather than listened-to. “Nobody, neither my teachers and nor my parents, told me how to get interested in social studies,” he adds: “All they simply want is that I must study.”

Parents, on their part, love to see their children performing well in exams. “What’s wrong in being solicitous about my daughter’s doing well in exams, after all she is my daughter,” asks Renuka’s mother Kamala Devi. “As parents we reserve the right to expect our wards to perform well in exams.”

At school, teachers expect their students to measure up to their expectations. Sandwiched between the two, the task of faring well in the exam becomes all the more cumbersome for children.

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