LEARNING

I accidentally found in my folder what I wrote as a blog few years back. sharing here for wider network.

Learning

This is one subject which ignites everyone to have a view point and my motivation came from the weekend lunch with couple of engineering batch mates and few instances in the past weeks. The foremost trigger is an unfortunate suicide of first year engineering student of Anna Varsity who supposedly could not cope up with the transition from Tamil medium to English, the next one is an article appeared in “The Hindu” co-authored by my buddy B. Arvind kumar

(https://www.thehindu.com/education/issues/article3336855.ece?homepage=true) ,the last being the issue of students with even single arrear history not being allowed for campus interview .

The young girl’s suicide is a shame on the education system and the article did not do any help to give confidence to the vernacular medium students. The one linking arrear to campus interview is the biggest joke going around for few decades. The common threads of three of us in the lunch were our schooling in Tamil and quite a few arrears in engineering. We had a hearty laugh as one of them lost count on the number of arrears. We use to add new words to the dictionary when we started writing answers in English, also felt bad for the professors for correcting it.

In my village, a tradition of learning swimming is followed in a unique way. A day after pongal celebrations , all the kids get rounded up and taken up to a huge well, at least 30 feet deep. Few elders get into the water and then the kids are pushed one by one without any life jacket. The essence is to take the fear of water out of the individual. The process is followed for few days and we have no one left not learning swimming. No single life is lost due to drowning in my village. As it suggests, learning starts when you get rid of fear of failure.

The immigrant labours from other parts of India pick up the southern languages in no time. It goes without saying that the language is key for their survival and they do not feel humiliated if they get it wrong few times. Whereas the so called little educated crowd is mostly worried what others think and hence do not learn. After all, little humiliation on the way is a good recipe for perfect learning.

In corporate life, one often stumbles upon people who blame their inefficiency on lack of training. They expect the organisation to take it upon themselves to identify what skills people do not possess and train them. In my younger days, I am a witness to the farm workers waiting with good collection of tools and ready to go for any work on a given day. They use to wait with the hope that someone would hire them for some work and hence ready with all the tools. As the manual farming slowly died, they all became operators on tractors, tillers, harvest machines, sowing machines and so on. No HR manager from any institution made a training calendar to upgrade them. It is their hunger for survival made them to learn and upgrade skills.

One of my friends had real difficulty in clearing Engineering Drawing. I was giving him company till the third attempt and he had one more try before he was to be barred from examinations. He decided to take private tuition from a hot headed professor. The professor got angry very often as things were not getting into his head. My friend assured him he would learn better if Professor is cool while teaching. Professor collected his cool and calmly asked him to draw a perpendicular line. My friend responded back “Sir, How many degrees”

He is currently the Chief design engineer for a leading MNC engineering firm.

Nothing is impossible. To learn, start shedding fear of failure, be prepared to face little humiliation along the way, have the hunger for survival.

Cheers

Bala

P.S: the co-author of the Hindu article is also from vernacular medium and went on for a Masters in English literature.