Once upon a time there was a direct coaching class in our city, where students were used to attend the coaching classes directly in the classrooms and on open terrace.
There was a dedicated teacher who took care of limited number of students for a private coaching in the core subjects like Maths, Physics, Chemisry, Biology and Computer Science.
Besides the coaching activities, there were wonderful activities like motivation classes, site seeing, get together parties, birthday parties, competitions, Kahoot quiz games, etc on holidays. Students were really very actively participating in academic and extracurricular activities.
There were regular early morning mottai madi (open terrace) classes. Student get up by 5:00 am and attend the early morning sessions from 5:30 a.m. These early morning sessions really help the students and developed good habits of waking up in the early morning. Pranayama was practised by all students for a better physical and mental fitness.
There was a tight schedule on Sunday for all students.
Sunday Gurukulam Schedule at Saitech
5:30 a.m. – Breathing Excercise
5:45 a.m. – Early Morning Maths Drill
6:30 a.m. – Walk along oral test with a few selected students.
7:00 a.m. – Early morning session over – Students may go home, refresh and come back at 8:30 a.m.
8:30 a.m. – Morning Breakfast at Saitech
9:00 a.m. – Motivation Class
9:15 a.m. – Physics Classes / Target Problems / Mirror Tests
11:00 a.m. – Tea break
11:10 a.m. Chemistry Classes / Target Problems / Mirror Tests
12:30 p.m. – Lunch at Saitech
1:30 p.m. – Team Activities – Quiz, Sketchnote, Memory challenges
2:00 p.m. – Preparation for unit tests
3:00 p.m. – Unit tests
5:00 p.m. – Reviews
5:30 p.m. – Session Over
Now everything is over due to COVID-19! No direct classes. Students have glued their eyes to smartphones and laptops in the so-called online classes.
Strengths of Online Classes:
- Anytime
- Anywhere
- Any pace
- No traffic jam
- Creative teaching
- Access to plenty of study resources
Weakness of Online Classes:
- Technology is accessible to every student equally.
- Internet technical issues
- Band width problems the service providers
- Diversions in social media
- Laziness of students
- No straighforwardness in writing the tests
- Online class misbehaviours
- Assessment problems
- No student motivation
- No physical activity
- No experiments
- No practicals
- Team spirit lost
- Out of sight becomes out of mind!! So, students have become half blind!!!
Let us pray together to God to resume all direct classroom sessions very soon in schools, colleges and coaching centres. If such online classes continue there will be tremendous lack of interest in education among students, parents, teachers and school or college authorities.
