“We spend our lives asking the question, ‘What do people want me to do? Who do they want me to be?’ But this is a betrayal of our inner truth. We should be investing our lives in the pursuit of discovering who we are and what we were created to do.” ― Elizabeth Grace Saunders, The 3 Secrets to Effective Time Investment: Achieve More Success with Less Stress” In line with Edooism 🙂
Being a Libran magnetically forces me to believe in balance. If the scales are tipping in one direction as far as my child is concerned, I put things back in perspective as soon as I can. I love my child’s ability to create the most fascinating lego construction ever !!Yeah ! He wants to be an architect since he was 4. He is 11 now. He still loves lego and any construction material. He is fascinated by buildings of all shapes and styles and loves cities. He went through a tough time at a certain school which lacked the know-how about “how to get a child interested in literature” They also felt super confident that it is extremely important that he enjoys writing ! Their abstract goal of forcing him to write 2 whole pages in between very small sentence parallel lines by hook or by crook….totally threw us off balance. They had no short term goals prepared to reach their over-ambitious long term goals which was apparently a check-point that would grade the school according to how the children perform. My child started retaliating in several ways as those two pages of writing biographies of famous people every week was beginning to become a tedious boring task. I would yawn several times in between telling him “You need to finish it or they’ll complain to me again rather than sorting it out themselves” Well we made a big change in our son’s life which changed everything. He loves writing now and needn’t be nagged to write. The subjects he is asked to write about at his new school are “What do you feel about the drought in the village” How would you help? Why do you think the story goes this way?” Children love that, they can relate to that !
What the #### is this “finish it business anyway thats there at schools?” Why do children have to just finish their work? They need to enjoy it reason with it and learn from it for God sake !!!!!! Curriculums need a change.
My main point here is that the pressure comes from somewhere and we tend to overload our children with too many classes and deadlines and no thinking time. Thinking time helps our children to find themselves.
How many of us know our strengths ? How many of us were given time to discover our aptitudes? How many of us have excelled at what we do? How many of us start our career very late ! Me !!! I had no direction. I thought I’d be an artist. Thats a very very broad term. What kind of art? what do I need to study for it? Noone could identify my strength and what direction i need to take as my batch and teachers were stressing on “ROTE LEARNING” & MARKS!! That 73 percent AT MY SSC board I got sleeping over a pile of books. I was always guilty of dreaming of painting and creating wall murals with messages for the world against atrocities. That was a sheer waste of my time. I had an end goal and no short term goals toward that.
Lets give our children those small steps toward their end goal by giving them ‘thinking’ and ‘exploring time’. Its a time they be by themselves almost like a meditation where they get to know themselves and then we get to know them. I believe my writing shall go a long way today with many of us. I will be more conscious of my child’s interests even when and if he changes them.
Comments