Very very very rare, truly rare is their appearance. If they appear at all, it should be celebration times indeed! Who do you think I am talking about? Celebrities from the sports arena who are extremely busy and quite hard-working? Business tycoons much much 'more busier' than the tinsel stars, and are absolutely hard-working? Nope!
I am talking about students being present in their UG, that is, under-graduate, classrooms. They are truly like comets! That is to say, they appear just once in some million/zillion years! Literally!
Go to any Arts and/or Commerce college. Classroom after classroom would be empty, absolutely vacant! There might be some resilient teachers who WOULD teach, even if only one student chooses to grace the occasion.
Mostly otherwise, nobody is concerned, neither the authorities, nor the teachers, least of all the students! I find their parents most interesting. (Why) Are not they worried about what their wards do? Do not they talk to their children about their studies, their progress, the difficulties (not merely academic) that they face?
Let me give you a few examples to prove my point. I used to teach in a famous Arts/Commerce/Science college. The first lecture used to be at 7.30 in the morning. In the whole big building, most often, it used to be just my Special Subject students and I!
The situation continues to be the same, year after year, decade after decade. The worst profile is of foreign language lectures in commerce colleges. To begin with, commerce students, whose future careers are going to be people sensitive, need languages hugely.
But their Marathi (or even Hindi) itself is nothing to write home about. Their awful English would be one of the major reasons the British would never ever dare to colonise India again! They cannot write two consecutive sentences correctly, neither in Marathi nor in English!
Now such students join the German classroom. They are learning a new language, literally from the ABCD. But they never attend lectures! Well, learning a foreign language is like a chain. If a chain snaps at one point, the entire chain is kaputt. Similarly, miss one lecture, and the chain of learning would snap. Obviously, an entire lecture cannot be repeated, though a quick revision is always the starting point of the next lecture.
Yet another point with a foreign language is that it is not used beyond the four walls of the classroom. So per day some fifteen to twenty minutes of practice is necesary back at home. Commerce lectures get over at 10.30, tops 12 on some days. The entire day is theirs to spend any which way. But they never touch the book till the next lecture, and it is a mercy if they get the book along! Keep extra sheets in the Xerox section, send message after message on the WhatsApp group; very few, those who attend lectures regularly, would bother to do the needful.
The teacher explains line by line, word by word. The teacher uses Marathi/Hindi to explain each and every word and grammatical concept. The teacher makes it utmost interesting through their own constant participation. The teacher gives umpteen examples to explain the paper pattern, the MCQ test structure. Only some ten students (of the forty-ish class strength) , who are rather regular, benefit!
Students, who have not attended even a single lecture, are under the impression that they can mug up the night before. That idea is WRONG, but it might be feasible/possible for a subject they would have studied for a couple of years, but surely not for a language whose letters of the alphabet they did not know till the academic year began.
Much worse are students who had a smattering of the foreign language in the junior college/school. They have forgotten everything, but they believe boastfully that they know, and can manage, every thing! One of the students who brandished his cent per cent marks (how he got them is a wonder!) at the SYJC level could not manage the simple most Akkusativ case, but he generally behaved, whenever/if he turned up at all, as if Goethe was his menial!
The most amazing are the people around who organise all, and every, possible extra-curricular activities (and practice sessions) at the same time as the foreign language lectures. Any number of students report back the wonderful comments such worthies make about learning a foreign language. Of course, one tries to convince the students that the worthies did not mean it that way. But they do know, right? How can you thus persuade to the contrary a young man/woman of nineteen years, right?
As a result, students expect that the paper be indirectly leaked. To your face, they tell you the names of other teachers who do it, and regularly. They rattle off names of teachers who give them the attendance sheets to sign on the day of the MCQ exam to process/prove cent per cent attendance. The only possible response you have is 'mum is the word'! No wonder, students just expect 'timepass' fun, and not learning, in classes if they attend at all!
And we talk of the demographic dividend!!!
Pratima@ Marked by absence is the authenticity, the sincerity, the accountability of such 'academics' if it at all be so called!