From my experience of teaching the students of XIth and XIIth from past many years, I can observe an undercurrent of dissatisfaction in the students/teachers and parents [i.e. all three communities involved in Child's education] After discussing the issue with all three concerned, I would like to visualize the issue from everybody’s point of view.

Students: The main issues concerning the students are:

  • No synchronisation between school preparation and the that for competitive examination
  • The teachers in schools are not competent enough to prepare them for the entrance examinations conducted at all India level
  • Lot of pressure on the students fro school to perform well in board even at the cost of bad performance in entrance examination
  • Parents are not able to understand the practical problem of students in dealing with vast syllabus
  • Lack of time as after school and coaching classes they are generally very tired and can’t study much.

Teachers: Discussing the same issue with the teachers involved in school education, their main concerns are

  • Students are not listening to what is being taught in the School as they have already covered the syllabus or will cover the same at coaching classes
  • Gross irregularity in attending the school and the sole purpose of coming to school is for getting the minimum number of lectures required to sit for Board examination
  • No incentive for hard working teachers if they work as hard as coaching classes tutors to satisfy the needs of the students
  • Their performance is solely judged by the performance of overall class in the Board examination and schools don’t encourage them to maintain balance in teaching
  • Duration of class is 35-40 minutes which is not at all sufficient for Physics or Chemistry class as with thorough discussion of articles the rate at which syllabus is to finished will be retarded.

Parents: Although they are not directly involved in teaching or learning process thier concerns are genuine. The main concerns of parents are

  • Why coaching is essential in all the science subjects even if the child is going to best school in the city
  • They are spending lot of money on coaching and the student is still not able to perform well in school examinations
  • Nobody [school/coaching class] is ready to take the responsibility of non performance of the student. Thus, willingly or unwillingly the pressurize the child to work harder.

Solution To The Problem

After analyzing the problem of all concerned i can’t think of an ideal solution to the problem. But still i want to suggest two possible ways to move forward

Solution :1

Schools can outsource the coaching work to some group of local teachers who are competent enough for both board and competition preparation. They can help students prepare for both board and competitive examination in the school itself. The performance of teachers should be judged not only by the score of student in board but also his/her rank in competitive examination.This can be done on profit sharing basis with the school

Solution:2

The teachers in the school are competent enough to prepare students from both and competition point of view. This can be done by engaging good teachers at good salary.