It is that time of the year (no, not talking about Bangalore rains) when results are announced for all public board exams in India. You have the proud toppers (with their prouder parents) who ended up – yes, you are reading it right – with 99% or more and centums in 3 or 4 subjects – even languages are not spared these days. Then you have the “not sure if they should be happy or sad” set who got above 95% and their parents lamenting how they lost the centums – a small careless mistake from their ‘almost there’ wards. Then comes the crowd – the 90% plus who are not sure if they should share their marks having scored so badly. No one ever talks about the < 90% – you will be met with “What went wrong?” and a look that is usually given to someone who has just been delivered a terrible news.
Why did we end up here? Simple. The middle class parents of India have just one aim in their life – settling their kid and an entire ecosystem has sprung up to benefit from it. A huge portion of that “settling” results in this unsettling notion of cut throat competition of marks and ensuring that they push their kid the farthest – at any cost. Can we blame them for wanting the ‘good life’ for their kids? I don’t know. What I know is that in this hustle-bustle of marks and competition, the very essense of learning has taken a huge hit. The love, wonder and excitement of a subject is nipped at the bud and instead the focus is on cramming the formulas and facts into the tender brains of the kids faster that the next school.
If you had ever studied ‘Linear Algebra’ in your life (could be once upon a time like me), do you remember the formula for “Determinant of a Matrix”. You probably do (claps to your Maths teacher) and you also probably solved several questions on that to ensure you did it “right” in the exams. Did you ever wonder what a determinant is – like what is it determining -> that we are bad at maths :-). There is a brilliant intutive video series (playlist) here by 3Brown1Blue and I was almost in tears when it finally became clear to me what it was all about. If this is what got missed in a single concept from a single subject, I shudder to think how many more such good stuff was never revealed to us by teachers who were evaluated only by the number of centums they produced.