Rural students of southern districts yet to recover from digital blow

It was a detached feeling for most of the students after getting used to spending most of their time alone during the online mode of learning. Except for a few hours of virtual classes, students were whiling away their time mostly.

According to Madurai Chief Educational Officer R Swaminathan, there is some slackness among students upon their return to classrooms. “To bridge the learning gap, the State government had introduced a 45-day refresher course with a concise syllabus in the interest of students in the academic year of 2021-22. Moreover, the academic syllabus is reduced to 65 per cent to reduce the learning burden. If students are attentive in their classrooms for the rest of the days this academic year, they will be able to pick up studies,” he said.

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As for primary level, it’s certainly difficult for many of the children to acknowledge online learning through which classes were conducted for namesake, many parents felt. Since the children felt at home while learning online, they were unduly distracted from their studies, many parents said.

From the teachers’ point of view, assignments to primary students were basic and simple and mostly done by them. To offset the difficulties in learning lessons, the students were taught through the ‘Kalvi’ television channel. Further, with the launch of ‘Illam Thedi Kalvi’, trained volunteers reached out to the doorsteps of students of high schools and taught them for about one and half hours. Apart from the refresher course for students, the teachers also got had exposure to ‘learning outcome’ subject wise.

A teacher of mathematics with a government higher secondary school of Sivaganga district said, unlike other subjects, educating students in a step by step method in Maths online was a formidable task. Also, students mostly hailing from poor economic backgrounds were not having smartphones with internet connectivity. With basic model cell phones, mostly illiterate parents seldom bothered about educating children and hence students could hardly access their daily schedule. “In such a backdrop, it would be a tight schedule to complete lessons for the higher secondary students in the rest of this academic year, even as the government has announced revision tests from February 9 to 16 and the next phase from March 15,” said the teacher.