The academic year that begins in June will have students in classrooms right from day one of the scholastic year, unlike the past two years that started in online mode and then branched to a hybrid method of teaching. This will bring some changes to the system. For one, the State Council for Educational Research and Training (SCERT) has decided to revert to the full-fledged syllabus for Class I to VIII, that had been curtailed by up to 30 per cent due to the pandemic and the online teaching. Classes IX to XII too will have the full syllabus as Goa Board of Secondary and Higher Secondary Education has taken a similar decision. The syllabus had been curtailed primarily to reduce the pressure on children who continued with their studies during the pandemic.
Reducing the syllabus was an extraordinary measure, but the situation was also very out of the ordinary, and academicians had not faulted the reduction in the syllabus due to the prevailing circumstances. It was not merely Goa that reduced the syllabus, but other States and Central education boards had done the same, clarifying at that time that this was a temporary measure. It was therefore expected that the entire syllabus would be restored once schools reopened their classroom doors to students. It could, however, lead to a gap in children’s learning process as having skipped certain chapters in the past two years, they may have trouble understanding or grasping certain concepts that would have had their base in the portion that was dropped.
However, it is not possible that chapters which were important in the years preceding the pandemic and will have importance in the coming academic years had lost their relevance during the last two years. The matter had its bearing in schooling the child and this cannot be glossed over. How will students return to those chapters that were dropped? Here, teachers will have to play a crucial role in ensuring that students who missed out on the earlier matter are given at least a briefing of what was missed. No doubt this has been recommended, but it is important to ensure that the children do not miss what they would otherwise have learnt during the two academic years that were truncated by the pandemic.
While the Internet permitted online classes to be held during the period the pandemic restrictions were in place, and so ensured that students did not miss a year, it did also lead to other problems such as the above. There is a month before the schools reopen and now that the authorities have decided to return to the full syllabus, they should prepare the teachers of the higher classes to teach the dropped portion of the last two years. It is pertinent to note that students answer competitive exams and common entrance tests, and any gap in learning could affect their performance at these. There will be some who may read the chapters on their own or at the insistence of their parents, but the vast majority will not.
The challenges before the teachers once the schools reopen will not be restricted to finding means to teach students portions of the curtailed syllabus. There will be many more and the issues that arose during the two-month period at end of the last academic year when teaching went offline could give an inkling of what could be faced by administrators, teachers and students. One can also not rule out the possibility of a fourth wave in June that some from the medical fraternity have cautioned about. It calls for some pragmatic decisions to be taken right now, before the schools begin, that will make learning easy for the students who go back to school campuses.
