Leave Them Kids Alone!

Because exam season is slowly creeping up on us! First written with friends in the Ochre Sky writing community.

Photo by Dev Asangbam on Unsplash

I grew up thinking that there were two kinds of people in this world. Those who were good at studies and those who were not. I had to be in the first group. It was not a choice I made - it was made for me by my parents long before I was born. I think I was born with a pencil and notebook in my hand, completing my homework of the day. Those who were NOT good at studies belonged to a different species. They were to be avoided at all costs. Whenever my father spoke to me about school, he would ask me who had stood first in class. Who had stood second? Who had stood third?

Then when I was twelve, we moved to another city, and I went to a new school. The momentum of my early childhood kept me going for a couple of years and then...the unthinkable happened. I was NOT so good at studies anymore. I just could not get Math and the sciences. Trains that rushed past each other at full speed. Ships that had holes in them and sank slowly to the bottom of the sea. Spooky bath-tubs that never got filled - even though there were five taps running to fill them. The world’s greatest unsolved mysteries and the stuff of nightmares all lurking between the covers of my Math book! I regularly failed Math tests. Chemical equations went over my head like they were Greek and Latin. I did not understand absolutely ANY of the laws of Physics except for the one where a fat man sat in his bathtub and displaced an amount of water that was equal to the volume of his body, and ran around naked shouting Eureka. Naaah – not even that one!

Oh, the shame of it. It was like bringing disgrace upon the family. It was unbearable. There was only one way out. The way that too many children still resort to in school: Read-Memorize-Write-Forget-Repeat. Well, to cut a long trauma short, I escaped with reasonably decent marks in my tenth boards. Fast forward some twenty plus years. My daughter is in the seventh grade, and she is doing brilliantly at a lovely school. Here, learning is fun. Kids can be kids. She is happy...but she does not seem to be swotting like we used to do when we were her age. Something must be wrong - very wrong!! Our parent antennae are up. Then, propelled by some evil force that must have been passed down to us from generation to generation, we yank her out of her beloved school and push her, kicking and screaming, into one of Bombay’s ‘biggest and best’ with a proven track record of high scores in the tenth grade.

We wait for her glorious future to unfold in front of our eyes, but it ends before it has even begun. For some time, she hangs on by the skin of her teeth to a place somewhere in the middle of the class. But soon, she finds herself near the bottom, in very deep waters, sinking. Hands flailing in the air whenever she comes up for a breath of air. But no one sees her drowning, and no one comes to help. She talks lesser and lesser at home and the light goes out of her eyes. She does not want to give up, but it is a very hard fight. I repeatedly appeal for help at the parent-teacher meetings. I try to explain to her teachers that she comes from a very different system of education. She actually loves to learn. Perhaps she needs a little encouragement? A little more support? But all we get is shame. It’s like talking to the walls. Walls covered with ugly trolls that only we can see. Who look at us disapprovingly and shake their heads. When one disappears, another one comes to take its place.

As the Big Bad Exam of the tenth grade comes closer, I notice that my daughter is frequently answering early morning calls on our landline. It turns out that one of her classmates has had to travel to the US with her mother and she must keep up with her schoolwork from there. She happens to be one of the best students in the class. Without being rude, I ask my daughter why she would reach out to her rather than one of the better students. My daughter mumbles something and I am shocked at the explanation. The ‘better students’ are not happy to give their time to help a friend in need. Their time is precious and every minute must be spent cramming for the big exam. Every mark counts. So she reaches out to my kid who has kept her kindness intact through these tough times. I am so, so, so proud of her that I float on air the rest of the day. Some of the shame lifts, and even some of the trolls on the walls look at us a little more kindly.

To this day, more than a decade later, this is one of my biggest regrets – that in a misguided quest for success, we took a happy child and, in a moment of bad, shameful, foolish parenting, let her loose to some of the worst things that the world could throw at her.